Tourism and Community Development Issues - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 193

Planning and Policy Support for CBT
Tourism as a system or sector faces multiple challenges, from dealing
with competing interests, multiple stakeholders and needing to coordinate
policy at various scales and levels (Dredge, 1996). Tourism planning and
decision-making processes can be highly political, as government partici-
pants grapple with the diversity and multi-scalar nature of public interests
and meeting the needs of its other constituents, including tourism industry
members, diverse residents and 'bottom-up' or grass-roots processes. CBT
planning approaches and mechanisms have been forwarded by Beeton
(2006), Gill and Williams (1994), Inskeep (1991), Murphy (1985) and
Simmons (1994), among others. In this section, several approaches are sum-
marized and aspects of the planning process examined in the context of
tourism and community development.
Participation in tourism and tourism planning
As proposed by Murphy (1985), a community-oriented tourism strategy
has four prime considerations: environmental and accessibility, business and
economic, social and cultural, and management considerations. Murphy sug-
gests an ecological approach to tourism planning, where systems theory can
be applied to explain the close interdependence among the living and non-
living parts of an ecosystem. A tourism destination area, where visitors inter-
act with living (hosts, natural environment) and non-living (facilities, sunshine)
elements to experience the tourism product, contains an ecological commu-
nity with species living together in a locality (Murphy 1985). A theoretical
framework offered by Michaelidou et al. (2002, cited in Himberg, 2006)
argues for equal consideration of ecosystem conservation and community
survival, as they are interdependent. Community viability in their approach
consists of four main categories: (1) culture (includes cultural sustainability,
plus environmental and cultural values), (2) well-being (includes economic
well-being and physiological and psychological well-being), (3) participation
(this involves community participation and community capacity) and (4)
knowledge (environmental and cultural knowledge). Hence, qualitative
changes as opposed to quantitative changes in community conditions should
be emphasized when talking about development (see various discourses of
CBT cited earlier). As these authors argue, project activities striving to be
community development should in the first place focus on ways of life rather
than livelihoods, and local people should have the option to decide what kind
of development, if any, is desirable to them. As summarized in the case exam-
ple of beach fale tourism in Samoa above, residents would draw upon their
values, beliefs, traditions and customs to guide the process of change.
Due to the close interdependence of the various parts of the community
ecosystem, Murphy (1985) suggests early involvement of the community in