Limitations of Local Community to Participate in Community-Based Tourism (CBT): A Study on Sylhet

Shelamony Hafsa

doi:10.7176/jths/45-03

Abstract

Community-Based Tourism is one of the emerging ideas of ensuring community’s participation in tourism developments as a contrivance of sustainability. And Sylhet is one of the naturally blessed areas in Bangladesh with tea-garden, waterfalls, tropical forests, community people and religious view. But Community people have lack interest on the participation of tourism activities due to different reasons. The main objective of this article is to identify the major limitations to community’s participation in Community-Based-Tourism in Sylhet region. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis is done for identifying those limitations. Regression analysis as well as other measurements was used to analyze the opinions/factors found from questionnaire survey. This paper identifies some limitations which are considered as the major reasons of community people’s poor participation such as poor communication skill and expertise of community people, low benefit sharing opportunity, poor decision making opportunity of them, poor knowledge ,insufficient marketing and financial supports . It also presents necessary recommendations based on the findings of the analysis on how these limitations could be removed and ensures more community participation in tourism development of that region. Keywords: Community participation,tourism and Community-Based Tourism (CBT), major limitations. DOI : 10.7176/JTHS/45-03 Publication date: December 31 st 2019

Highlights

Travel and tourism is one of the fastest growing industries (Dwyer and Spurr, 2010) and day by day, it is contributing more and more to the world economy (WTTC, 2016)
Community Based Tourism has been perceived as an effective instrument for poverty alleviation and reduction by many development organizations
Summing up the research result can be said that communities in Sylhet have enormous potential of unused resources and opportunities for Community Based Tourism (CBT) development

Summary

Introduction

Travel and tourism is one of the fastest growing industries (Dwyer and Spurr, 2010) and day by day, it is contributing more and more to the world economy (WTTC, 2016). Community-Based Tourism is a form of tourism which emphasis on the involvement of the host community in every stage of tourism development process in order to make it more sustainable. Different ethnic community people stay there who have attractive cultural and historical background. Community people are unable to participate because most of the cases they have poor decision making opportunity and profits earned from tourism industry aren’t properly distributed among the beneficiary groups. Community people sometimes can’t directly involve due to poor financial support to run a business and poor specialized skill. Even sometimes they aren’t properly informed about community’s participation and their benefits.

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion