Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The promotion of community tourism
Conservationists and development practitioners have promoted community
tourism in developing countries since the 1970s. It is often incorporated into
community conservation strategies that include integrated conservation and
development projects and community-based natural resources management. The
purported logic is that community tourism can augment the development options
of resource-dependent rural communities - it has the potential to diversify liveli-
hood activities and generate income, thereby alleviating poverty and enhancing
biodiversity conservation. The profile of the approach has risen as major donors
have assisted in community tourism product, organizational and programme
development. For example, 32 World Bank projects supporting protected areas in
Africa between 1988 and 2003 included a community tourism component (Kiss,
2004) and the large Transfrontier Conservation Area Tourism Development
Project in southern Africa has an enterprise fund to support community tourism
development.
Community tourism manuals have been developed to guide field practition-
ers and there has been a recent flurry of publications extolling 'good practice' and
positive contributions to development and conservation. General guidelines for
practitioners have been produced by international conservation organizations
(The Mountain Institute, 2000; WWF International, 2001) and bilateral develop-
ment agencies (InWent, 2002). Specific guidelines for Rwanda have been
developed with support from the United Nations World Tourism Organization
(WTO) ST-EP Programme (Townsend, 2006) and a market access training
manual has been developed by WTO, the Regional Tourism Organization for
Southern Africa and The Netherlands Development Organization, SNV (Rozga
and Spenceley, 2006). Good practice compilations featuring community tourism
projects have been compiled by WTO (WTO, 2006), the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP, 2006a) and the Caribbean Tourism
Organization (CTO, 2007). In addition, an inventory of good practices in
community tourism in protected areas in the Asia-Pacific has been developed
(APEIS-RISPO, 2006).
Critical appraisals of community tourism
It has been contentiously suggested, however, that mounting empirical evidence
indicates that most community tourism projects have not contributed to local
poverty reduction or delivered sufficient incentives for conservation (Goodwin
2006a). Writings emanating from early reflections on integrated conservation and
development projects in the 1990s cautioned that income generated from tourism
had been disappointing (Goodwin and Roe, 2001). More recent publications
have raised major concerns about the ineffectiveness, potential unsustainability or
failure of community tourism enterprises and a lack of accountability with regards
to responsibility and performance.
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