Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
General lessons learned in the Richtersveld
Collective property and community decision making
One of the lessons learned from this experience is that it is definitely very hard to
get a good functioning tourist system, including administration, management and
marketing system when you work with a community committee. The main reason
for this is that: decisions take a long time to be made, the community and its
representative committee is too indecisive, nobody is prepared to take a risk.
Unless they are really legally responsible and representative they will avoid making
a decision on the most basic issues, especially to spend money on marketing
outside of the community.
Private investors, on the other hand, think about their investment and know
they need to make money to be sustainable.They will not be bailed out by a donor
who is prepared to spend money on community projects. If a private owner sees
that his enterprise is not working or not correctly working he will do something to
fix it and make it better. But in the case of a community they have not invested in
the infrastructure and hence they do not feel the pressure personally in their
pocket if it does not work.
Realistic tourism development
The expectations created in South Africa about the potential of the tourism
industry to assist rural development have had an impact on policy and practice.
TRANSFORM indirectly became one of the proponents of these approaches and
as such has learned valuable lessons. One of the main factors limiting tourism
development is that not every place and location can actually be developed for
tourism purposes (Spenceley and Seif, 2003).
The geographical location of the Richtersveld makes it very difficult to set up
an income generating tourist industry. In geographical terms the Richtersveld is
simply too far away for most people to visit.You need a 4-wheel drive vehicle to
see the park. A private investor who is prepared to fly people into the area and has
access to vehicles, might be able to deal with this. However self-drive tourists were
always going to be scarce. Initially we supported the Trans-Frontier Conservation
Area in the hope that a route which allowed tourists to travel through the
Richtersveld on their way to Namibia could be attractive. It does not seem like this
flow of tourists has materialized.
Advisory roles of implementing agencies
A key lesson for any implementing agency coming out of this project is to clarify
where you agree with the community and where you differ early on in the process.
As can be seen, while we agreed on the biodiversity conservation and IDP issues,
the parties involved differed on the best strategy to promote sustainable tourism.
In hindsight one lesson learnt is that TRANSFORM could have played a stronger
advisory role in illustrating how an association with a private partner could bring
more economic benefits to the community than a community-based tourism
venture. TRANSFORM could have started looking for private partners who
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