What is it about?

Community-based tourism promises to give local people greater control over tourism and a fairer share of its benefits. But what does “community-based” really mean in practice? Drawing on long-term anthropological research in Tanzania, this article examines what happens when these ideals meet everyday realities. Communities are rarely unified groups in which everyone has the same interests, opportunities or influence. The article shows how conflicts over money, representation and decision-making can emerge, particularly when externally funded projects come to an end. It also highlights the crucial role of local tour guides. Guides do much more than show visitors around: they tell tourists who local people are and what their culture means. Their training, knowledge and working conditions can therefore influence both the quality of the tourist experience and how communities see and represent themselves.

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Why is it important?

Community-based tourism is widely promoted as a way of combining sustainable tourism, local empowerment, cultural preservation and economic development. These are valuable ambitions, but this article shows why good intentions alone are not enough. Treating a “community” as if everybody within it shares the same interests can conceal inequalities, competing identities and struggles over who controls tourism and receives its benefits. The long-term case of the Cultural Tourism Programme in Tanzania is particularly revealing. The programme was initially celebrated as a successful model of sustainable tourism and grew rapidly. Yet problems became more visible after the external development agency withdrew. Cooperation weakened, conflicts emerged over revenues and resources, and weaknesses in management, quality control and guide training became apparent. The article therefore stresses the importance of long-term planning and effective handover strategies, rather than assuming that a time-limited development project will automatically become sustainable once external support ends. Most importantly, the article draws attention to a group that tourism planning easily underestimates: tour guides. Tourists may spend more meaningful time with a guide than with almost anyone else in the community. Guides consequently have remarkable influence over how visitors understand the people and places they encounter. Investing in locally grounded, professionally trained and adequately rewarded guides is therefore not simply a matter of improving customer service. It is central to culturally sensitive, equitable and genuinely sustainable community-based tourism.

Perspectives

For me, one of the most important lessons of this research is that we should be cautious whenever the word“community” makes tourism development sound simpler and more harmonious than it really is. Communities are not homogeneous entities speaking with a single voice. They contain different interests, aspirations, inequalities and relationships of power. Calling something “community-based” does not automatically make it participatory, equitable or sustainable. My fieldwork in Tanzania made this particularly tangible. The Cultural Tourism Programme had received considerable international praise, yet spending time on the ground revealed a much more complicated picture. What interested me was not simply whether the programme was a success or a failure, but the gap between an appealing development model and the messy social realities through which it had to work. Tour guides became especially important in understanding that gap. Guides occupy a fascinating position between visitors and the people being visited. They do not merely convey facts. They select stories, interpret cultural practices and explain who people are. In doing so, they actively participate in producing images of both communities and destinations. When that process works well, guides can enable meaningful encounters. When it works badly, tourism can reinforce stereotypes, misunderstandings and existing tensions. I also became increasingly convinced that sustainability has to be understood over the long term. A tourism initiative can look successful while donor support, funding and outside expertise remain available. The real test comes later. Who maintains standards? Who trains the next generation of guides? Who resolves disputes? Who keeps people motivated to stay when better opportunities arise elsewhere? And what happens when the development organisation leaves? For me, that is why community-based tourism remains both promising and problematic. The answer is not to abandon it, but to take its social complexity much more seriously. Meaningful participation requires attention to power, representation, professional capacity and long-term relationships, rather than assuming that invoking “community” somehow solves these issues.

Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

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This page is a summary of: Community-based cultural tourism: issues, threats and opportunities, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, August 2011, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2011.596279.
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