Community Based Tourism
Finding the Euilibrium in the COMCEC Context
8
Madagascar 196 225 20.5 14.8 321 -
Malawi 746 - -1.2 - 47 -
Mali 169 - 5.6 - 205 -
Mozambique 1,718 - 17.6 - 197 231
Myanmar 311 391 27.7 25.9 73 -
Nepal 603 736 18.3 22.1 344 386
Niger 74 - 12.3 - 79 -
Rwanda 619 - -4.2 - 202 252
Samoa 129 127 0.2 -1.6 124 -
Sao Tome and
Principe
8 - -47.4 - 9 -
Senegal 900 - 11.1 - 453 -
Sierra Leone 39 - 5 - 26 -
Solomon Islands 21 23 12.4 11.8 54 73
Sudan 495 536 17.8 8.3 94 -
Togo 202 - 34.7 - 66 -
Uganda 946 - 17.3 - 784 -
Uni. Rep. Tanzania 754 - 8.5 - 1,254 1,457
Vanuatu 97 94 -3.5 -3.5 -
Yemen 536 - 23.5 - 622 -
Zambia 815 - 14.8 - 125 -
Source: UNWTO, 2012
Although some of these LDCs recorded high growth rates (e.g. 39.2% in 2011 compared to
2010 in Bhutan), the actual numbers are too low to consider significant (37,000 arrivals in
2011 in Bhutan). Hence, the need for development, especially tourism development is
evident in many of these LDCs. Sustainable tourism has been the key area in efforts to
develop some of these countries. However, it also has been criticized for some of the
shortcomings that could hinder achieving locals’ full participation and the resultant target
outcomes. Therefore, a more holistic and comprehensive approach to development,
requiring initiation, planning and execution by the locals and for the locals was needed.
Although sustainable tourism promotes community participation, protection, and
improvement of the quality of life for all (France, 1998; Lea, 1988; Roseland, 2005), its top-
down approach to distributing empowerment to stakeholders is considered as an obstacle
to collaborative community participation (Goodwin and Santilli, 2009; Sebele, 2010).
People’s participation would highly be determined by the power structure and distribution
among the community members, thus rendering the success of any poverty reduction effort
dependent on the existing institutional, legal and political framework (Wang and Wall,
2005). Sharing the same goals of sustainability, a new model entitled “the Community-
Based Tourism (CBT)” became popular in the mid-1990s, reversing the development
approach to bottom-up, in an effort to provide real and all-inclusive community
participation at all levels of the development (Asker et al, 2010).
Similar to other tourism development models, there is a “major gap between the academic
definition of the concept and the way it is used by practitioners” (Goodwin and Santilli,
1.5. Emergence of Community-Based Tourism