Community-based Enterprises Research Articles

Community-based Tourism Enterprises Development in Kenya: An Exploration of Their Potential as Avenues of Poverty Reduction

The United Nations World Tourism Organization endorses tourism for economic development and poverty reduction in developing countries, emphasising the role of micro-, small- and medium-sized tourism enterprises. In Kenya, community-based enterprises (CBEs) are preferred. This paper evaluates CBE potential and challenges for poverty reduction in Kenya. Reviewing literature on Kenyan tourism development, it uses case studies of six Kenyan CBEs spread across Kenya's tourism-focused community-based initiatives selected using opportunistic and snowball sampling. The case studies used individual in-depth semi-structured interviews with community leaders, CBE managers, tourism academics, support organisations and government officials, and focus groups with community members. The paper develops a detailed understanding of the CBEs, identifying the catalyst for their establishment and the role and degree of external intervention. It explores critical success factors, the extent to which CBEs alleviate poverty, and factors making communities welcome CBEs (or not). The results emphasise the conservation orientation of CBEs, with support agencies preferring partnership approaches involving white investment which inadequately addresses community priorities. Through foreign resource control and heavy reliance on donor funding, CBEs promote neocolonialism and reinforce dependency. An urgent review of the support framework for community tourism development in Kenya integrating the principles of sustainable development is advocated.

Tourism in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) is a transboundary protected area that straddles the borders of Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The park's development was partly motivated by the ecological objective of re-establishing traditional migratory wildlife routes once fences between the three countries are dismantled. Besides biodiversity conservation benefits, the park may also provide a basis to generate revenue for conservation and local economic development through tourism. This paper describes current state and private sector tourism within the GLTP and planning initiatives that may promote responsible tourism, and describes the achievements by community-based tourism enterprises and public–private partnerships in generating economic, social and environmental benefits. The livelihoods of people living in the park are outlined in relation to government policies on land redistribution, resettlement and options for the future, and progress in biodiversity conservation and responsible nature-based tourism development within the GLTP over the past five years is evaluated. 1Research Fellow, Transboundary Protected Areas Research Initiative, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. This research was supported by the BMW Chair for Sustainability, University of the Witwatersrand and the Transboundary Protected Areas Research Initiative (TPARI), an IUCN-SA programme funded through the Centre for the Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, Carnegie Mellon University, by way of a co-operative agreement with the National Science Foundation (SBR-9521914). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendation expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or Carnegie Mellon. The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who commented on a draft of this paper. This paper is largely drawn from Spenceley (2005); the full paper is available at http://www.anna.spenceley.co.uk/files/Tourism%20InvestmentGLTFCAMar05.pdf

Local perceptions of forest certification for community-based enterprises

Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification has been promoted as a way to encourage and recognize community-based forest enterprises (CFEs). However, certification has proved more difficult for CFEs than expected, and few certified operations have achieved the highly anticipated market benefits of certification. This has led to questioning of the compatibility of certification with CFEs, though few studies have directly asked local CFE actors their perceptions on this issue. This study investigates perceptions of certification for two CFEs in Brazil's western Amazon. The specific objectives of this study were (1) to determine the positive and negative aspects of certification as perceived by community members, their principal support organizations, and other key stakeholders, (2) to identify the relative importance of these perceived positive and negative aspects, and (3) to analyze the differences in perceptions between actors. Data were collected through structured interviews and a review of pertinent documents. Overall, the most positive aspects were economic and social, and the most negative aspects concerned the certification process and, to a lesser extent, the associated economic expenditures. Community members typically scored the positive aspects higher and the negative aspects lower than the support organizations. This is likely due to differences in roles and vantage points of these actors. In general, informants agreed that positive aspects of certification outweighed negative ones. This stands in contrast to some communities in other parts of Latin America that are contemplating dropping certification. Two particular conditions may have enabled operations in this study to overcome common constraints for CFEs: (1) membership in a regional producers group, and (2) strong political, technical, and financial support from the state government. Their experiences specifically highlight the need to adapt the certification process for CFEs and demonstrate that obtaining market benefits is possible.

Tourism and Poverty Alleviation: The Case for Indigenous Enterprise Development in Kenya

The World Tourism Organization (WTO) asserts tourism as a vehicle for economic development and poverty alleviation (EDPA) in developing countries. Among EDPA strategies, WTO highlights small enterprise development, stressing government support in such development. Tourism in Kenya is foreign owned, so economic benefits leak from the local economy. It emphasizes safari/coastal products and exploits the southern and coastal regions in an anachronistic and colonial model of tourism development. A new, postcolonial model of tourism development involving small indigenous enterprises and promoting cultural products to new markets would seem an obvious vehicle for EDPA in Kenya. Thus, Kenya's capacity to promote the development of indigenous enterprises is of interest. This study of 12 indigenously owned Kenyan tourism enterprises and six support organizations explores the challenges to tourism entrepreneurship in Kenya. The 12 enterprises fall into three categories: community-based enterprises (CBEs), and formal and informal individually owned enterprises (IOEs). Formal IOE managers had independent means and were well educated and appropriately experienced through public sector careers to deal with bureaucracy. CBEs (community initiatives offering products/services based on the natural environment) employed competent managers to address skills gaps. CBEs provide paths for skills development while raising community tourism awareness. However, community tourism development is externally driven, often by nongovernmental organizations, and can be regarded as a form of neocolonialism. Kenya's draft National Tourism Policy favors the development of CBEs as a way to enhance linkage. This article concludes that formalizing tourism enterprises in Kenya would require significant government investment in support mechanisms to provide sustainable tourism development opportunities for Kenyan communities.

Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Firm: The Impact of Economic Scale on Political Participation

There is a considerable body of theoretical literature that argues that nature of economic structure (e.g. function, size, ownership, diversity, and location of firms) has a powerful effect on community politics and on social networks and norms which may affect politics. Specifically, many claim that manifestations of increasing economic scale such as larger firm size, more commuting, and less independent ownership disrupt a community's social fabric which, in turn, results in political disengagement among community members. Despite these assertions, there have been few efforts to empirically assess effect of economic context on mass-level political participation. This article seeks to investigate several of these propositions about effect of economic scale. These propositions are empirically tested using a cross-level data set created by integrating 1996 National Election Study with information about each respondent's community economic context collected from various sources. These analyses reveal that, contrary to many contemporary claims, retail size, retail density, and independent ownership have little effect on political participation. Commuting, however, does have a strong effect on political participation, but it is aggregate level of commuting within one's community that apparently matters more than one's own commuting status. n 1994, 700 citizens of small New England town of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, turned out to vote in a local referendum. At stake was whether Wal-Mart would be allowed to build a new superstore in their community. After votes were tallied, Wal-Mart's bid to locate in community was rejected overwhelmingly. Among many press accounts detailing pitched battle between citizens and superstore was one that noted that community activists opposed not just Wal-Marts specifically but all sprawl-marts that suck . . . everyday social life out of small (Goodman 1994). Several months later, in an article surveying more than 100 battles in which Wal-Mart was then engaged with local communities over location of superstores, another journalist noted that Wal-Marts were feared not just because of economic effects of their arrival in local communities, but because they represent Main Street merchants who can't support Boy Scouts, soccer league and Rotary Club because megastore has driven them out of business (Walters 1995). In both press accounts, journalists and activists that they quote make explicit claims that some change in economic scale of their community (in this case, introduction of large retailers) powerfully affects civic life of community. Such speculation is not confined to journalists and civic activists either. In his 1994 Nobel Symposium paper, Bowling Alone, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam suggested that the changes in scale that have swept over American economy in these years-illustrated by replacement of corner grocery by supermarket and now perhaps of supermarket by electronic shopping-athome, or replacement of community-based enterprises by outposts of distant multinational firms-may perhaps have undermined material and even physical basis for civic engagement (1994, 25). Like commu-

Chinese Economic Restructuring: Enterprise Development through Employee Ownership

This article seeks to establish the factors and circumstances in China's rural and urban sectors that have prompted communitybased enterprises in the former and state-owned firms in the latter to undertake privatization through partial employee buyouts. Emergent employee ownership systems are briefly examined, and their unique features are analyzed in the context of local conditions. High and intermediate level official interventions are discussed. Research needs are considered.