Title:

Communities, conservation, and tourism-based development: Can community-based nature tourism live up to its promise?

Author(s):
Publication Year:
2004
Abstract:

As community‐based approaches to natural resource management have gained popularity in conservation circles, some advocates of this approach have looked towards nature tourism as a means to ensure that participating communities benefit from CBNRM. This paper analyzes the opportunities and tensions generated by efforts to use conservation‐based tourism as a catalyst for economic development. By exploring how historical legacies position actors and influence relationships between them, characterizing the nature tourism sector and its logic, and examining how liberalizing states are likely to engage with community‐based tourism. I situate community‐based nature tourism ventures in a broader political economic context. The paper draws from research on the Makuleke Region of Kruger National Park, South Africa to illustrate how these factors influence prospects for community benefit from protected area tourism.2 For example, the Ma‐kuleke's interactions with conservation managers, donors and advocates, government bureaucrats, and private sector entrepreneurs are structured by their relative poverty, limited technical expertise, and secure title to a valued conservation area—and by tourism market structures. While historical legacies of exclusion and dispossession and market structures often disadvantage community initiatives, nature tourism may have substantial promise in places where communities have secure tenure or title to an area valued by private sector entrepreneurs. Realistic appraisal of nature tourism in community contexts requires attention to the multiple political economies in which these efforts are embedded.

Publication Title:

Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy

Issue:
7
Pages:
161-182
Item Type:
Journal Article
Language:
en

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