Abstract
The current paper aims to identify the distribution of ecotourism attractions, identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of ecotourism development, as well as formulate appropriate development strategies. Qualitative descriptive analysis was employed by relying on various methodologies including direct observation, unstructured interview, focus group discussion, and documentation study. It was found that Kapota Island possesses tremendous ecotourism resources and potentials due to its abundant biodiversity, such as coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass meadows, beaches, dive spots, cave, lake, landscapes, customary and traditional culture, as well as historical heritages. The island’s diversity and uniqueness remain pristine/maintained due to the support given by the Wakatobi National Park Office (Balai Taman Nasional Wakatobi – TNW), customary institutions, and local communities. Accordingly, future development strategies include: (a) integration in the development of ecotourism destinations, local island based industry, collaborative marketing through digital tourism and organization of local operators; (b) orientation towards community based ecotourism to strengthen empowerment and participation of local communities; (c) capacity building of ecotourism actors and operators (tourism awareness group, Kapota customary institution, and Village Owned Enterprise administrators); and (d) increase of collaborative capacity among stakeholders.
Highlights
The government’s attention to take advantage of Indonesia’s ecotourism continues to rise due to its immense potentials and the existence of 54 national parks (Ministry of Environment and Forestry - KLHK, 2019)
Most ecotourism destinations are located in conservation areas that have biodiversity potential, but natural beauty potential as well (KLHK, 2019)
Data from KLHK (2019) shows that the total of conservation land areas in Indonesia has currently reached 27.134 million hectares, which are distributed into 554 units of conservation areas
Summary
The government’s attention to take advantage of Indonesia’s ecotourism continues to rise due to its immense potentials and the existence of 54 national parks (Ministry of Environment and Forestry - KLHK, 2019). The idea communities so that ecotourism must criticizes and offers a new concept to the function as a potential instrument to development approach that is oriented improve social behaviors for environmental toward the exploitation of natural resources conservation purposes (Buckley, 2003). This kind of tourism travel pays inclined to pay little attention to the active significant attention to the natural role of local residents. Neo-populism is oriented relationship with local communities and the toward placing the entire development location they visit leads to a positive public http://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/eot e-ISSN: 2407-392X. Wakatobi had been carried out in three understanding about ecotourism, and stages, namely: (1) Wakatobi National Park existing dynamics of local politics
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