Ban Pa-Ao, pro-poor tourism and uneven development

Abstract

Pro-poor tourism faces two dilemmas: first, the financial returns to a community are often very small, partly consequent on poor local entrepreneurial skills; second, those returns are too often captured by the few villagers with entrepreneurial skill. Thus, questions of local capture and unevenness of development arise. These issues are explored through the case of Ban Pa-Ao, a village in Thailand's Isaan region. The method is to follow both the supply chain and the income (money) chain in various sectors of the tourism economy to trace the distribution of the benefits from tourism viewed in the context of nested core-periphery relationships, via insights from dependency theory, also from post-colonial theory. These benefits are found to be both concentrated and regressive. However, there is a more positive outcome in a wider development of entrepreneurial skills and political awareness. Pro-poor tourism can be both empowering and exploitative.