Tourism and Community Development Issues - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 187

Stronza, 2010). In Sankoyo, most households have benefited from employ-
ment and tourism development (Arntzen et al. , 2003b, cited in Mbaiwa &
Stronza, 2010).
In her study of community tourism ventures in Botswana and sub-
Saharan Africa, Dixey (2009) notes that a wide range of NGOs, development
agencies and government departments have provided significant technical
and financial assistance to CBT development in Botswana from the early
1990s. The IUCN/SNV CBNRM program has provided substantial direct
and/or indirect wider benefits in some communities in northern Botswana
although wide local differences in the impacts of CBT development have been
noted. In some instances, the material benefits have been mostly restricted
to trust employees and board members of the community trusts set up and
the benefits to local livelihoods were seen to remain small (Arntzen et al. ,
2003a, cited in Dixey, 2009). A review of the SNV experience in three CBT
trusts concluded that the most important benefit was the process of com-
munity empowerment in becoming managers of their natural resources;
overall, CBT benefits generally appear to have largely accrued to village elites,
at the expense of those most dependent on natural resource use for their
survival - the poorest (Rozemeijer, 2000, 2003, cited in Dixey, 2009). Dixey's
(2009) evaluation reveals a number of constraints to effective CBT in
Botswana and sub-Saharan Africa, including a lack of institutional support
and marketing, plus dependency on external organizations and sponsors.
CBC programs, such as CBNRM in Botswana and CAMPFIRE
(Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources) in
Zimbabwe, appear to contribute positively overall to sustainable livelihoods,
local control and environmental conservation; however, they also raise
oft-ignored questions in terms of cultural sustainability and the commodi-
fication of human-environmental relationships. Aided by international con-
servation organizations, government and scientific interests, participating
villages in the CAMPFIR E program learn to employ wildlife population cen-
suses, village mapping, monitoring and other management techniques to
ensure a healthy wildlife population for recreational hunting and non-
consumptive safaris. Income from these tourism-related activities is applied
to community development projects; women are also seen to benefit from
CAMPFIRE. However, too little information is available on how this suc-
cessful program affects local people's perceptions, identification and relation-
ship with commercially valued wildlife that was once simply part of
everyday life and the non-capitalist lifeworld. The concern here is not that
economic valuation is inappropriate for managing public or 'free' goods but
that by valuing or defining wildlife purely in economic terms, it becomes
primarily an economic resource, and other values for community well-being
risk being omitted in decision-making. Too few questions are raised about
the instrumental discourses of rationality, efficiency and technical plus sci-
entific control that structure ecotourism practices and create generalized