In recent years, there has been a shift in interest in travel, toward an increasing interest in sustainable travel and alternative forms of travel. As a result, there is also an interest in research studying these alternative travel concepts. Therefore, this qualitative study looks at experiences in ecovillages, focusing on volunteer workers. It examines the effects of the ecovillages that influence these volunteers to become environmental stewards. For this purpose, the concept of place attachment, as the connection to the place and the people within the ecovillage, is used. As well as the concept of transformative learning, i.e., the change of views and orientations of the participants of the learning program. To get a better overview of the context of the case study, the literature on voluntourism and voluntourism in the global north (due to the location of the case study), as well as on communities and eco-communities will be examined. The case study is an ecovillage in Ireland, located in Cloughjordan, the middle of Ireland. There, 11 in-depth interviews and observations were conducted, and the volunteers were interviewed about their experiences and their time in the ecovillage. The results of this study suggest three ways in which volunteers are influenced by their ecovillage experiences to become environmental stewards. On the one hand, this is the case due to the recognition of the importance of the developed soft skills. As this is learning for oneself and improving communication with other people. Furthermore, by learning with and from each other, the volunteers are led to take stewardship actions. Finally, it is also the community itself that manages to implement stewardship among the volunteers through the way of life and togetherness and the high value of environmental actions through place attachment.

Chagga women who control land on Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, have a deep and profound sense of attachment to their lands and homes. This thesis compares their reasons for attachment to the systemic model. The systemic model states that community attachment is dependent on social ties and interactions. The three factors that lead to these ties are length of residence, social status, and age. In-depth interviews with women in 2002 and 2003, a survey from 2002, and field notes from 2002 and 2003 are used to explain the main factors of attachment of women in three villages on the mountain: Mbahe, Marangu, and Chekereni. This research finds that social ties are not dependent on length of residence, but do have some connections with social status and age. Women have social ties regardless of their length of residence. They interact with each other no matter the social status of the other, but this occurs more frequently as the women are more involved in education and religion. Western influences, land shortages, and economic pressures are causing the interactions of the young and old to be more strained. Though social ties are partly related so social status and age, this thesis finds that the attachment of Chagga women does not completely follow the systemic model. Instead, the women's attachment is primarily associated with family ties. The land has provided food and income for their families for generations and it is the hope of each of the women that it will continue to care for their families in such a way.

The predominant theorists of community in American sociology define community as either geographically confined local solidarities or as networks or relatively close primary ties. These definitions fail to recognize the realities of modern life, let alone life in the context of a global economy. Community according to the earliest community sociologists was a way of organizing society wherein all the social interactions necessary to the reproduction of daily life were embedded in moral relationships, which were historically primary ties located within local solidary communities. With modernity, most of these social interactions have been removed from those moral relationships, and now occur on in a global marketplace where individuals feel no moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions. In such a context, today's predominant theories are no longer viable. In order for community sociology to remain relevant, we need an approach to community which reincorporates all of interactions necessary to daily life and that recognizes the social costs of modernity. The three articles in this dissertation together offer critiques of today's predominant theoretical approaches—the Community Saved and Community Liberated arguments, as Barry Wellman has named them—and provide an alternative that is suited to social life embedded in a global marketplace. The alternative is based on an honest reading of the so-called Community Lost argument—honest in that it is not biased by the straw men built up by the Community Saved and Community Liberated proponents—and extends that argument to include the work of several late-modern theorists (particularly, Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck). This revived version of the Community Lost argument allows us to address directly all the social interactions necessary to community and to understand the relevance of local solidarities and networks of primary ties as centers of moral proximity.