Local Participation in the Planning and Management of Ecotourism: A Revised Model Approach

Abstract

Ecotourism is increasingly being advanced as a strategy to help address economic and social problems in local communities, and as an appropriate and effective tool of environmental conservation. The full and effective participation of local communities in the planning and management of ecotourism is, however, rarely a feature of ecotourism projects. At best, ecotourism projects tend to aim for the 'involvement' of local people, and at worst, ecotourism projects can ignore the issue of local participation completely. Such projects frequently fail after a relatively short period of time. This paper sets out to identify a number of elements of good practice in incorporating the fundamental principles of local community participation into the processes by which ecotourism projects are planned and managed. Taking lessons from this good practice, and drawing on a model previously developed in the early 1990s by Susan Drake, a revised model approach for local participation in the planning and management of ecotourism is then introduced and discussed. While this revised model approach was originally developed in the context of marine ecotourism in the EU Atlantic Area, it is arguably more generally applicable to different types of ecotourism projects and across a wider spectrum of geographical locations.