Community-based Tourism as Strategic Dead-end

Abstract

Jim Butcher rightly points out how community-based tourism (CBT) has maintained its status as orthodoxy in some academic and non-profit quarters despite its numerous flaws and contradictions which, as also correctly noted, have not received the recognition or attention from tourism scholars that they deserve. This blindness suggests that proponents are still locked into the ideologies and assumptions that framed its introduction in the early 1980s as the sine qua non of alternative tourism. Corporate mass tourism, as is well known, was regarded by many academics of the left as inherently evil, and locally controlled small-scale tourism served as a diametrically opposed and morally correct counterpoint (Dernoi 1981). Although long discredited as simplistic and naive (see for example Butler 1990), this dogma unfortunately is still reflected and advocated in most of the CBT discourses that have proliferated in subsequent years. A Questionable Record of Success If replication alone is regarded as a parameter of success, then CBT has been highly successful, given the hundreds of examples that have been established throughout the world during the past 30 years and partially inventoried by scholars such as Buckley (2003) and Zeppel (2006). CBT, undoubtedly, remains the option of choice for most nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government agencies that include tourism in their developmental portfolio. Honey (1999) describes how just one agency, USAID, was involved with 105 CBT-focused ecotourism projects in the mid-1990s. More recent initiatives, such as the trans-boundary Heart of Borneo proposal, continue to advocate CBT as a core developmental principle (Hitchner et al. 2009).