Ambiguities and difficulties in partnership relations: the case of ‘fair tourism’ in Western Africa

In France, a few tour operators gathered together to form the Association for Fair and Solidarity Tourism (ATES), created with the intention of using tourism to contribute to the development of certain destination areas through the implementation of fair relationships with the host communities. Although ‘fair tourism’ is an emerging theme in research on tourism, and the subject of an increasing number of studies, especially on the Fair Trade in Tourism in South Africa certification initiative, very few academic studies have focused on partnership relations, the difficulties they face and their influences on the fairness of the resulting tourism. With the help of field work investigating ATES members and their partners in Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso, we highlight, understand and interpret the relationships encountered by the partners in this North–South cooperation and the factors that are likely to influence it. We found that fair-tourism projects face the same issues, and are likely to give rise to the same failures, as development projects. One major difficulty results from the idealisation of the partner, which inevitably leads in turn to a mismatch between the expected and the actual behaviour of the actors involved.