Tourism and Community Development Issues - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 188

strategies and approaches for 'sustainable' community development and
conservation, while enabling ecological modernization (Rutherford, 1999)
(see Chapters 3, 9 and 15). Associated with neoliberalism, this discourse
brings natural areas into the network of global capital markets through ratio-
nal and scientific management of resource use and conservation, and has
tended to eschew or marginalize emotional, socio-cultural and spiritual
values. In Vanuatu in the south-west Pacific region, the adherence of the Roi
Mata Cultural Tours to the equitable redistribution of benefits across the
whole community sits uneasily against international development indicators
based on individual wealth accumulation and profit maximization (Trau,
2012) (see Chapter 7).
Indigenous tourism, cultural empowerment and grass-roots
planning/action
Much greater discussion is, therefore, needed on identifying mechanisms
for cultural empowerment and ensuring that cultural knowledge is valued
and used in CBT and CBC, and is able to temper the rationalizing and mana-
gerialism of an externally driven tourism industry (see Mowforth & Munt,
2009). Lazrus (2005: 4) identifies an important issue when she says that
'social and ecological simplification is necessary to render the local situation
legible to managing authorities'. Speaking in the context of climate change
concerns in the independent nation-state of Tuvalu in the South Pacific,
Lazrus (2005) states that governance, political inequality and knowledge are
intimately linked in environmental governance, and power issues play out in
the institutional context of government and NGO policy-driven research and
claims to authority that are juxtaposed with place-specific knowledge.
Observed shifts to incorporate local and traditional forms of knowledge
reflect a positive and much-needed move to redress the tendency of govern-
ment officials and scientists to simplify representations of humans and envi-
ronments, which 'allows for an essentially universal set of applications to
govern complex local systems from afar' (Latour, 1987; Lazrus, 2005: 4). Para-
doxically, Lazrus (2005: 16) feels that globalization and global governance
have brought more diverse types of knowledge to the policy drawing board,
which may become 'exceedingly important as challenges to justice, national
sovereignty, and human and natural security increase'. Social equity and
inclusion in the policy drawing board are especially important considerations
with respect to sustainability issues such as climate change, as health, habi-
tation and the livelihoods of vulnerable groups, especially the poor, and
women, children, elderly and indigenous populations in rural, island and
coastal communities, are at risk of being disproportionately affected (Dulal
et al. , 2009; see Chapter 11). Community-based collaboration between
scientific experts, the tourism industry and local inhabitants is essential
to bring scientific knowledge, indigenous knowledge and local knowledge