Donor funded tourism projects: factors for success.

This paper has been drafted to inform the discussions of how we evaluate sustainable tourism projects in the context of 20 years since the Rio Earth Summit, which will take place in the 6 Responsible Tourism in Destinations conference in Sao Paulo, 18-20 June, and in London on 21 June. It draws on the inter-disciplinary literature on the efficacy of donor activity and on the results of a Delphi study undertaken to elicit views from professionals engaged in tourism development about the factors which are key to success or failure of donor funded tourism projects. We review the literature on project success and failure around the role of the donor, the business of aid and the monitoring and evaluation of aid programmes. The literature informs research funded by the Global Partnership for Sustainable Tourism which is hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme. A policy Delphi survey was used to seek the views of practitioners about critical success factors in tourism interventions. The purpose of this was to determine which initiatives should be funded to achieve the donor’s objective of enabling multiple stakeholders to adapt, replicate, and scale-up successful projects. The results suggest a number of measures donors can implement along the project lifecycle to internally ensure projects are more realistic, to be more market oriented and mainstreamed, to increase conditionality of aid on agents, and to improve monitoring and evaluation transparency.