Informalisation of international volunteering: A new analytical framework explaining differential impacts of the ‘orphanage tourism’ debate in the Netherlands

Abstract

Over the past years, there has been increasing public criticism of international volunteering. Yet, the academic literature has so far given limited insight into the diversity of this complex and ‘liquid’ field. To fill this gap, this article develops a taxonomy of volunteering providers with different goals and behaviours. The value of this new taxonomy is illustrated by applying the analytical framework to ‘orphanage tourism’ in the Netherlands. The study highlights the differential impact of public criticism on orphanage tourism, with a catalysing effect on the trend of informalisation towards increasing prominence of smaller nonspecialist development‐oriented providers in this field.

Orphanage tourism and orphanage volunteering: implications for children

“…As a result of hearing consistent evidence regarding the potential negative impacts of orphanage tourism and connection to orphanage trafficking, the Australian government launched the Smart Volunteer campaign to prevent Australians from inadvertently contributing to child exploitation through the practice of orphanage tourism, including by participating in misleading volunteer programs, in addition to a range of other legal responses (van Doore and Nhep, 2019). In 2019, the Dutch Parliament held a Parliamentary Roundtable and commissioned research on how the Netherlands is involved in orphanage tourism (Kinsbergen et al, 2021).…”

The value of diasporic cross-border philanthropy and voluntourism

“…They focus on the goals and interests on the travelers, see volunteering as a goal itself, and are quite dependent on the demand for their service. Fourth are the commercial tourist companies that also offer options to volunteer; they also go by the preferences of the travelers and see volunteering as a goal in itself; however, they are fairly independent from the trends in volunteering (Kinsbergen et al, 2021). Despite the differences, most of these organizations work with models of shared volunteer management (Brudney et al, 2019), which offer the advantage of higher volunteer inclusion (van Overbeeke et al, 2022).…”

A Research Agenda for Civil Society

“…To capture the diversity and complexity in the field, Kinsbergen and colleagues created a taxonomy of international volunteering providers (Kinsbergen et al, 2021), which in our view distinguishes volunteer tourism from other types of international volunteering clearly. In the taxonomy, distinctions are made on two dimensions, orientation (tourism vs development) and volunteer strategy (primary or secondary), resulting in four types of international volunteering.…”

“…They focus on the goals and interests on the travelers, see volunteering as a goal itself, and are quite dependent on the demand for their service. Fourth are the commercial tourist companies that also offer options to volunteer; they also go by the preferences of the travelers and see volunteering as a goal in itself; however, they are fairly independent from the trends in volunteering (Kinsbergen et al, 2021). Despite the differences, most of these organizations work with models of shared volunteer management , which offer the advantage of higher volunteer inclusion (van Overbeeke et al, 2022).…”