This sharing is for educational purposes in relation to community-based ecotourism development in developing context.

1. Community-Based Tourism
Emergence, Challenges and Intervention
Strategies
Dr. RITH Sam Ol & Dr. Neth Baromey
January, 2011

2. Overview
• Introduction to sustainable development
• CBET concepts, theory and principles
• CBET intervention and development
• CBET challenges and contributing factors
• Understand the CBET communities
• Revise CBET Development Goals
• Overcome intervention challenges
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3. 3
Sustainable Development Emergence
• The emergence trend of SD is related to the growing concern of
environmental and social problem.

4. Key Sustainable Development Principles
• Equilibrium: Balance triple
bottom lines.
• Holistic: Applying participatory
approach in making-decisions
concerning the use of resources-in
planning process.
• Equity: Equal access to resources
and the right to participate in
benefit sharing without structural
constraints.
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5. Movement Contributing to CBT
55
Democratization
Decentralization
Community-
Based
Development

6. Democratization & Participatory
Development
• CBT application: local as a self-
reliant entity capable of
rationally using and managing
their resource.
• CBT as endogenous
development:
– Disperse the benefits widely
– Initiate from the bottom at
local level
– Underpin downward transfer
of decision-making
66

7. CBT Characteristics
Ecological
sustainability
Economic
self-reliance
Local
control
Meeting
individual needs
Enhance local
culture
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8. 88
Governance & Natural Resources
Decentralization
• Participatory and civic-based model is emerging due to the
addressing environmental concern which could not be solved by
the government solely and the need to seek for consensus
solution to common resource management problem.
• In responding to community interest and minimize conflict and
generate social capital, collaborative planning is the plan seek
to active participation of many potential implementing partners
through which dispute resolution in term of conservation and
development are solved.

9. • Democratic governance:
– Provide enabling environment for broad-based socio-
economic growth
– Foster competence and effective resource management
– Offer space for collaboration between state and non-state
actors.
• Lacking the mean and capacity to kick-start of community
initiatives, community take up partnership in 3 forms:
1) Community-civil society
2) Community-government agency
3) Community-government agencies-civil society group.
9

10. Enabling Factors
• To enable community
initiative and development:
– Core tenet of
empowerment
– External support and
mediation in the early
stage of development
– Funding and technical
capacity (Heaps)
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11. 11
CBET Concepts
– Core element of enterprise-based conservation strategies
– Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM)
– Decisions and actions that are driven by community after
reflection about their circumstances
– A mean for local empowerment and community
development
– Is based on local initiative
– One of the way to balance commercial orientation of tourism
development with the needs and goals of local people.

12. 12
• Three main goal of CBET:
– Foster a better understanding of the entire development
situation
– Promote the formation of a common value base
– And Increase recognition of interdependence among
stakeholders and promote sustainability.
• CBET context: mostly situated in protected area/area that is
designated as national or a global natural heritage/an ecologically
significant zone which need to:
– Protect environment
– Address local community livelihood.

13. 13
Actors & Resources in CBET Intervention
• CBET models can be:
1) Conservation/NGO model
2) Government agency/Industry
association model

14. 14

15. 15

16. 16
CBET Intervention Processes

17. 17
CBET Intervention Processes

18. 18
CBET Intervention Processes

19. 19
CBET Implementing Processes
• The key to success CBET sustainability:
– Stakeholder collaboration
– Active local participation in tourism planning and
development.
• CBET process involves transforming rural village and remote
wilderness area into tourism destination:
1) Construction of supportive physical infrastructure
2) Prepare community
3) Build community-stakeholder relation and social network.

20. CBET Challenges
• The outcome is showed
differently from the two
different models.
• The environmental goal is
strived by the conservation
model, while the government
model is seek to achieve
economic development.
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21. Economic Orientation in Govt. Agency Model
• CBET is seen as vehicle for
helping the government in
developing countries to
answer the financial problem,
who tend to adopt structural
adjustment program viewed
as set of neoliberal ideas.
• Major goal: To generate
revenue and make profit for
involved stakeholders and to
pay of loan.
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22. 22
Economic Orientation in Government
Agency Model (Cont.)
• In developing country context,
better quality of life means to
create new business, employment
opportunities and increase
environmental awareness.

23. 23
Economic Orientation in Government
Agency Model (Cont.)
• The voice of market and economic agenda is prioritized, while
local play as victim and intervention recipients/helpless and
passive actors due to the match with “State-civil society
partnership” derived from national tourism policies.
• From this implication, national tourism policies tends to be
geared toward the generation of economic growth from which
tourism means employment, balance of payment, local
development and foreign exchange.

24. Environmental Orientation of
Conservation Model
• In this model, CBET is
viewed as:
– Revenue generation
mechanism for protected
area management
– Alternative livelihood
providers
• These two combination
could quit the community’s
destructive traditional
cultural way of life.
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25. 25
Environmental Orientation of
Conservation Model (Cont.)
• Mostly, community becomes poor dependent community due to
prescriptive policies which have been predefined elsewhere.
• The failure of CBET seems to occur since deprived communities
have to follow conservation model namely classical approach.
• Characteristic of classical approach:
– raising fund for protected area management
– Keep pristine environment for tourists
– Denied local access to livelihood resources.

26. 26
Limitation of CBET Intervention
• Overall challenges of collaborative process in community:
– Misunderstood the concept of “local community” as
homogenous
– Competition access to existing resources (CBET asset)
– No consensus in term of intervention outputs and
participation procedure, but be pre-designed else where
– Intervention focus on interested groups in CBET, but
policies, rules and regulations apply to entire local population
– Conflict among communities & inadequate empowerment
– Lack of capabilities from local communities to participate in
policy making unresponsive to their needs and interest
– Inactively take part in policies implementation by local
people.

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Limitation of CBET Intervention
• Power originated from the resource mobilization
• It could be understood through:
– Organizing and interacting resources with structure
principles, institutions, practice and agencies.
– Examining actor controlled over resources development
– Be shaped by motives, resources and tactics

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• Collaborative outcome: product of actors pursuing motive by
drawing on tactics and a range of resources.
• Motive: refer to an actor‘s reasons for intervening.
• Resource: personal skills and social connections, and structural
properties of social system in discourse.
• Collaboration is depended on:
– Resource availability
– Presence of stakeholders and objectives
– Roles and responsibilities
– Presence of supportive legal framework
– Quality and quantity of resource stakeholders
Collaborative Planning

29. 29
– Less power group has been put silence and more powerful
groups has been provided legal advantages.
– Less demographic atmosphere of isolated rural communities
– Social negotiation, resource organization as both enabling and
constrain structures could include and exclude individuals or
networks who are not supportive to the discussion.
– Depend on the degree of convergence in stakeholder
objectives and their receptiveness to innovation options.
– Is tricky to extend to nurturing empowerment
– Inadequate understanding of local communities to make
informed decisions
– Communities could not make decisions on what they really
need from CBET.
Limitation of Intervention Process

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Solving CBET Challenges:
Understand the CBET Communities
• The four conceptualization of community:
– Place-based entity
– Local social system
– The understanding of community based on “togetherness”
• The precaution need to be considered in term four
conceptualization:
– Avoid idealizing the concept of community
– The mistake of understanding of community as a homogenous
social entity
– No isolate and static entities

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• Prepared community needs:
– Meaningful participation
– Social capital to influence likelihood of community
– Community capacity
• The elements for constructing CBET:
– Type of information flow
– Livelihood strategies and social conditions
– Political and organizational capacity
– Conflict, willingness for change
– Entrepreneurship

32. Community?
Place-Based
Definition
a social group of any
size whose members
reside in a specific
locality, share
government and have
a cultural and
historical heritage.
Interest-Based
Definition
a self-defining term
based on a sense of
shared
interest/purpose and
common goals.
(Joppe, 1996:475)

33. 33
CBET Development Goal Revision
• Local people have to be placed at the centre of the SD quest.
• The achievement of CBET is to develop the sustainable
community with the capable and resilient community that allow
local to make their own decision on how the best lead on their
own lives.
• The goal of CBET is to achieve the community capabilities and
freeing the community from deprivation.

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35. 35
Success and Failure of CBET
Development
• The success of CBET development is depending on two major
factors:
– Capacity of the community to operate and manage CBET
– The capacity to maintain CBET as a community-oriented
development.
• Characteristic of fail CBET:
– The powerful actor show their interest in the popularity of
the destination and want to capture the development right
from local people.

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• Community needs multiple capacities:
– Financial capacities
– Technical capacities
– Organizational capacities
– And social capacities.
• The capacities could obtain unless there’s access to basic
freedom including resources and opportunity structure:
– Economic facilities
– Social opportunities
– Transparency guarantee
– Protective security
– Protective security
– and political liberties

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Overcome Intervention Challenges
• Solution to overcome challenges for intervention:
– Depend on actors’ performance and institutional involvement
– Partnership and collaborative decision making process to
build social capital
– Realm power of stakeholder in development
– Participation, decentralization and collaboration
– Finer-grained assessment to determine the degree of
receptivity and responsiveness
– Choosing the right partners and build up positive relationship

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Conclusion
• Collaborative planning as strategies to achieve sustainable CBET
development could build up social capital which promote mutual
understanding and enhance the quality of the process and
likelihood for further collaboration.