Community-Based Tourism in the Developing World

Community Learning, Development & Enterprise

Peter Wiltshier, Alan Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351026369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book analyses community-based approaches to developing and regenerating tourism destinations in the developing world, addressing this central issue in sustainable tourism practices.

It reviews a variety of systems useful for analysing and understanding management issues to offer new insight into the skills and resources that are needed for implementation, ongoing monitoring and review of community-based tourism. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book explores alternatives to the dominant interpretation which argues against tourism as a benefit for community development. International case studies throughout the book illustrate and vouch for tourism as a transformative force while clarifying the need to manage expectations in sustainable tourism for community development, rejuvenation and regeneration. Emphasis is placed on accruing relevant decision-support material, and creating services, products and management approaches that will endure and adapt as change necessitates.

This will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers and academics in the fields of tourism impacts, sustainability, ethics and development as well as the broader field of geography.

1
Principles and practices

Case studies in innovation

Peter Wiltshier and Alan Clarke

Introduction

We define emerging tourism destinations in the context of community-based tourism (CBT) as places that have yet to achieve maturity in developed or mass tourism; as spaces that have the capacity to explore, analyse and interpret visitors’ responses to an offer; as areas for the application of contemporary and emerging visitor management practices (Coccossis, 2017; Dangi and Jamal, 2016). These emerging destinations have quite likely not reached a crisis in capacity control or exceeded limits of acceptable impacts from tourism according to commentators and as judged perhaps by the academy as well as by visitors.

Furthermore, the warning signs for exceeding these constraints of social environmental responsibility may not yet have been noticed. Contributors to this book have clearly signposted opportunities for future development from tourism; contributors also acknowledge destination strengths to strive for a sustainable future that includes tourism.

The book captures glimpses of opportunity and indicates strengths in destinations from Zambia and Malawi to Uzbekistan and Belarus. Chapters also acknowledge democratic political processes in play from Malaysia to Botswana.

The literature surrounding community-based tourism (CBT) has common features with the literature impacting social welfare systems, health and education. In effect, some of the underpinning concepts that are employed in CBT emerge from the body that concerns communities wishing to develop, rejuvenate and refresh. In this text the underpinning twenty-first century contributions are discourses about resilience, equity, accessibility, wellbeing, affordability, localisation and responsibility. The issues underpinning all of these contributions are emerging from the development and implementation of the sustainable development goals (see Boluk et al., 2017).

Therefore, this text addresses the conceptual contributions and melds methodological and discursive views with the case studies explored by the chapter authors from the dialectics of emerging destinations. To clarify, the editors seek to balance the conceptual starting points for today’s stakeholder with the actual practices in emergent destinations and address those needs, expectations and aims of stakeholders deliberately seeking to use tourism as a springboard for community development.

We also see parallels with the debates around the development of sustainable tourism. There are roots into the communities as the rhetoric builds the harmonious development of economy, environment and socio-cultural factors. These areas should not be seen as separable in anything other than an analytical sense. Economics has been considered to be the cornerstone of tourism development as without a profit there is no motive to drive or guide tourism development. More than that, however, CBT allows economics to be valued in more open ways as it allows the exploration of the connections between and through parts of the communities. Similarly, the environment should not be viewed as a canvas on which tourism is to be painted. The environment is an active agent shaping and being shaped by the way communities grew through them, liberating some features and constrained by others. What makes these interconnections possible is the socio-cultural aspects of the communities.

The basic model of the three elements also form the foundations of the triple bottom line – often used in the critiques of capitalist development: people, profit and planet. The triple bottom line lens seems to offer a sharper look at the business activities within the communities. It also offers an alternative way into understanding the construction of stakeholder spaces and places.

We see stakeholders as representatives of demand and supply in a strict input-output economic model (Slack et al., 2013). However, stakeholders are coincidentally filling key roles in demand and supply under the auspices of the sharing economy: the economy of co-creation and co-production in which lines of strategy, operation and control are not mutually exclusive for supplier or consumer. The essence of the ‘co’ in these terms is embedded in the role the stakeholders have in multi-directional communications. These are the agents who have to be engaged in shifting the direction of development from ‘top-down’ to ‘bottom-up’ practices. A phenomenon of shared responsibility in driving community-based tourism is an emerging theme which is further explored in chapters on the Southern African communities.

In addition to an economic focus we take a stance on quality and competitiveness as drivers of success in endeavours to understand and grasp the essentials of CBT in emerging destinations. Quality and competitiveness have a solid contribution in themes of exemplar case studies. Managing systems and business processes must go hand in hand with success in practice (Uzumeri, 1997). Service improvement, quality management, and a customer-relationship orientation accompany more prosaic issues like standards assurance, environmental management practices, knowledge exchange and retention to address needs of resource and skills shortages and management of monitoring and performance data analysis (Dumas et al., 2013). Sharing and creative economies rely on adaptability and human creativity. It is with this creativity and immense zest for life and gratitude for being a gifted and relied-on individual that communities turn into destinations that are distinctive and typical of human creativity (Florida, 2006). Individuals, as part of the larger sharing community, perceive that they give value to all people, organisations and the wider society (den Ouden, 2011). Innovation is typical of experiential services such as tourism in physical, delivery, and support roles and supply chain and is exemplified in these cases (see Voss Zomerdijk, 2007; Pechlaner et al., 2012; Weiermair, 2004). Such destinations are emblematic of continuous improvement and innovation strategies and feature, as we can see from each study, cycles of regular innovation, niche innovation and revolutionary innovation (Pikkemaat and Weiermair, 2003).

Social issues for CBT reflect the withdrawal of resources and policy and planning work from central government with deregulation and decentralisation. The fact that this might not be a surprise probably comes from the way these arguments have been well advanced for almost forty years in Europe and North America, Putnam, 2001.

Outcomes in socially equitable and adaptable communities rely on skills possessed of a wide array of local stakeholders; sometimes termed modernisation and engaged community practices (Hoggett Mayo and Miller, 2008). Such social adaptations rely on creating a locally skilled and resilient community that can capture destination ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1979) and community image, values and branding without alienating stakeholders nor ignoring the need for an analytical approach supportive of policies addressing equity, sustainability and innovation. Building CBT from inside the community from the bottom upwards builds a healthy repository of new social capital for future aspirations of entrepreneurs and public sector workers intent on renewal in communities (Flaccavento, 2016). Presciently some chapters identify that the empowered elites where wealth has traditionally become concentrated are responding to equity and equality issues by focusing on capital invested to social enterprise (within the shared economy), on small, even micro-, businesses that can be managed by small groups within the community. In order to do this, we do see a focus on narratives that capture unique and distinctive stories for dispersal within the community, and importantly, across boundaries to acknowledge meeting challenges in both mobility and accessibility of the co-created economy.

Our case studies represent what is perceived to be excellence in social adaptability, practices in ambiguity and dilemmas of development that identify, apportion and monitor outcomes from shared responsibility.

Elements of economics, society and the physical representation of destination thus form the basis of a systemic approach to a sustainable community-driven model of good practices (Jamal and Stronza, 2009).

Essentially, on three environmental fronts, and with empowerment as a key theme, authors identify successes in emergent economies where communities can be turned into destinations. Successes feature issues to do with acknowledging the special and unique nature of communities (habitus). Simultaneously these successes reflect the co-creating facility and capacity to innovate, reflect, and acquire deep learning to create repositories of competitiveness, quality and differentiation. Each case study represents the best in product innovation in Belarus, process innovation in Brazil, managerial innovation in Malta and Zambian institutional innovation (Hjalager, 2010).

The editors acknowledge prior research to manage community-based tourism with embedding best practices and therefore recommend the ACES model to destination managers, students of tourism management, practitioners in consultation in community regeneration and renewal, investors in tourism and storytellers willing and able to add unique offers to hosts and guests in emerging destinations worldwide. We commend our eight stage ACES model detailed as follows.

Revitalisation and rejuvenation

A situational analysis of a destination from a participant observation perspective is presented in Part 2 where future directions for that destination are offered. The bottom-up and community-driven aspirations for tourism are presented as a partial salvation to community capacity building (Giampiccoli, 2015; Zahra, 2010; Mair and Reid, 2007; Beeton, 2006). Tourism therefore can be perceived as a conduit for capture of community beliefs and values to be embedded by stakeholders in a variety of business trajectories. Tourism can reflect many stake-holders’ concerns for revitalisation, rejuvenation and independence and mirror resilience and the unique nature that local centres of excitement offer. Thirty years’ reflections on Philip Putnam’s’ ‘Bowling Alone’ illustrate the need for localisation and for individuals to work collectively at grassroots level to elevate their environments and summarise their offer to investors and guests.

Turning a community into a destination: “Why should we adopt tourism?”

Every stakeholder must consider and develop plans for future success in community development and resilience (Swanson and Edgell, 2013). These chapters reflect plans that may include tourism development as themes for future relevance and endurance. Having a substantive plan for tourism development that reflects contemporary political policy guidelines and therefore mirrors a need to be embraced at a local, or even a regional, level is conducive for educators and policy directors to entice tourism business to take a confident approach to development alongside key elements of business development and partnership with negligible fears contradicting start-up business or micro-business. There should be few contraindications for success in return on investment or dubious marketing and branding activity undertaken by new operators in the community. This has been relatively well documented (see for example, Thomas and Thomas, 2006; Getz and Carlsen, 2005; or, Middleton, 2001).

Process of building a destination starts with values, beliefs and identity: “Evidence to support our beliefs in tourism”

A fifteen-year window of relevance to collect inalienable beliefs, values and identities was drawn up for Kangaroo Island, South Australia by Manidis-Roberts in 1997. It appears that all communities must reflect, sift, analyse and blend these values, beliefs and resulting identity over extended periods to joyously produce plans for the future that indicate where the destination journey has taken stakeholders to the current time. Again, we expect to identify and prioritise opportunities for micro-business to cooperate with partners in supply chains and recognise that evolving practices still mirror beliefs and values as they will inevitably change and not feel discouraged to embark on diversification or product development in the context of external negative political or social pressures (Zehrer and Raich, 2013; Wiltshier, 2007).

Resources needed for destination building: “What do we need here”

To undertake an exercise in reflection, an inventory to accompany the values and beliefs statement – a brief document exploring what is relevant and largely agreed to be used in building tourism for the community from this moment – i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Principles and practices: case studies in innovation
• 2 A benchmarked step by step community-based tourism (CBT) toolkit for developing countries
• 3 Systems approach to community-based tourism
• 4 A responsible CBT approach
• 5 Community-based festivals in the context of community-based tourism
• 6 Rethinking tourism in Belarus: the opening of a rural economy
• 7 The importance of information and communication technology for dissemination, commercialization and local protagonism in community-based tourism initiatives: a case study of CBT in Castelhanos, Ilhabela, Brazil
• 8 Community-based tourism: planning processes and outcomes in the developing world
• 9 ‘Meet the locals’: community tourism – an approach to combat over-tourism in Malta and Gozo
• 10 Reviewing the background to success in communities developing tourism: an evaluation through participant observations
• 11 The path: from agricultural country to popular travel destination
• 12 Community-based tourism: the Romeiros Way in São Miguel Island in Azores/Portugal
• 13 Community based tourism – the kiwi variation
• 14 Community-based tourism engagement and wellbeing from a learning perspective
• 15 Systems, stakeholders, storytelling: tourism development and conservation in the peak district and the Balaton Highlands national parks
• Index