By Martha Honey
Editor's Note: Excerpted from Chapter 3: Ecotourism Today from Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns Paradise?, by Martha Honey. Copyright ©2008 by Island Press. Excerpted by permission of Island Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Ecotourism's Promise - and Pitfalls
By the opening of the new millennium, ecotourism had taken on global significance. International funding organizations, NGO's, governments, and tour operators of all sizes began turning to ecotourism. It was no longer a "specialty" industry with little global impact. It had become a significant economic activity, especially in developing countries, and was being used as a tool for conservation and community development. In addition, the principles and good practices of ecotourism were beginning to impact-and change-the broader, mainstream tourism industry. "Green" hotels, sustainable ski slopes, Blue Flag beaches and "committed to G" golf courses were signs that tourism as we had known it was beginning to change. By 2006, it seemed clear that ecotourism was being propelled forward by a rejuvenated and rapidly rising environmental consciousness. As Condé Nast Traveler wrote in announcing the winners of its 2006 Green List of outstanding ecotourism businesses, "The Green movement has arrived. Want proof? Americans buy organic, locally grown produce. We drive hybrids. We spend $10 to watch not a Hollywood superhero but a politician with a PowerPoint presentation [i.e., Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth]. And travelers are increasingly looking for options that keep the earth and its occupants in mind: More than 75 percent of Condé Nast Traveler readers recently surveyed deemed it important for hotels near impoverished areas to help local people obtain education, clean water, food, and health care."
While there is clearly much to celebrate, the path toward a more planet-friendly tourism, toward genuine ecotourism, is lined with pitfalls. Ecotourism is not a panacea; at present, it is a set of interconnected principles whose full implementation presents multilayered problems and challenges. A number of pressing issues surround ecotourism that are crying out for deeper investigation, more rigorous analysis, and more careful theoretical work. A discussion of the most important of these issues follows.
Indigenous People, Protected Areas, and Ecotourism
In his keynote speech to the IUCN's 2003 World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, former president Nelson Mandela noted that while national parks like Kruger are a source of pride, "Unfortunately a great many South Africans do not see it as such, and for very understandable reasons." He went on, "Many of Africa's beautiful protected areas have their origins in the colonial past, and have a legacy of being ‘set aside,' thus alienating local people who viewed them as meaningless or even costly." Mandela did not mention that the colonial tradition of creating national parks by forcibly seizing lands and evicting the local people has continued, in some countries, up to today.
In the early 1960s, on the cusp of the end of colonialism, there were about 1,000 protected areas in the world. Today there are 108,000, a hundredfold increase in the last four decades. This equals more than 12 percent of all land, and exceeds the IUCN's target of protecting 10 percent of the earth, as was proudly announced at the 2003 World Parks Congress. "At first glance, so much protected land seems undeniably positive, an enormous achievement by good people doing the right thing for our suffering planet," writes investigative journalist and Berkeley professor Mark Dowie. "But," he cautions, "the record is less impressive when we consider the impact of setting aside large tracts of land upon millions of displaced indigenous people." These displaced people have created a new class of "conservation refugees" found on every continent but Antarctica. They are largely invisible, often live in squalid conditions around protected areas, and are roughly estimated to number between 5 million and tens of millions of human beings. One of the largest forced removals, which attracted international attention, occurred in the central African country of Chad. While the total protected area was increased from 1 percent to 9.1 percent in the 1990s, an estimated six hundred thousand people were evicted from their lands.
Many of the world's approximately 350 million indigenous people live in spectacularly beautiful parts of the globe, areas increasingly penetrated by tourism, frequently in the name of ecotourism. Indeed, often the most vibrant and militant rural social movements in developing countries center on national parks, local people, and tourism. As one study of ecotourism and economic liberalization puts it, "a new grassroot environmentalism gained strength worldwide in the 1990s [and] became connected to issues of social justice and the concept of environmental justice." These struggles have pitted local communities and indigenous people against their own governments, international development agencies like the World Bank and USAID, and, not infrequently, against the agendas of international conservation organizations. Mac Chapin, in his 2004 critique of the relationship between local communities and large conservation organizations, the so-called BINGOS (Big International NGOs), claimed that "cooperation by the large conservationist NGOs, both among themselves and with other, smaller groups, including indigenous and traditional peoples, has lost ground over the past decade, only to be replaced by often intense competition, largely over money." Fundamentally, these struggles are over who owns and controls the land's scarce and valuable resources. As Clark University professor Cynthia Enloe reminds us, "Tourism is not just about escaping work and drizzle; it is about power, increasingly internationalized power."
In many places, these movements were for decades held in check by colonialism, military regimes, or one-party states that prohibited local organizing. Resistance took the form of individual or group acts of sabotage, poaching, fires, or cutting of trees or bush inside protected areas. However, since the mid-1980s, a number of factors have coalesced in Latin America and Africa to heighten the ability of rural people to organize. These factors include the economic and political liberalizations of the 1980s, the growth of local and international environmental movements, the decline of military dictatorships in Latin America, an end to white rule in southern Africa, moves toward multiparty elections in many countries, and an increasing realization that sustainable development, even though supported by national and international programs and funds, must be carried out by empowering, educating, and providing tools and infrastructure to local communities.
In Tanzania, for instance, the Maasai living around Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area have organized to demand a sizable slice of the tourism pie and the return of their rights to use land and water within the parks. In Zimbabwe and South Africa, rural people anticipated that with majority rule, national park lands would be returned to them. When this did not happen, they organized, often in alliance with local environmental and rural development groups, to win a stake in running the parks and tourism facilities. In Zimbabwe, CAMPFIRE (Communal Area Management Programme for Indigenous Resources), a loosely organized nationwide network of communities that conducts hunting and camera safaris, became, in the 1990s, internationally acclaimed as a model of rural development through ecotourism. Even though the CAMPFIRE program provided income and inputs for community development projects, the majority of rural Africans involved were guides, porters, trackers, artisans, and waiters; rarely were they managers. In Ecuador's Amazon basin, indigenous groups, occasionally with support from Quito-based or international environmental organizations, militantly resisted oil-drilling operations and have set up alternative, environmentally respectful economic activities in the rain forest.
In these places as elsewhere, those living around or in parks, reserves, and other protected or fragile ecosystems have increasingly come to see ecotourism as an economic activity with the potential-if done well-to provide both environmental protection and financial and material resources. In addition to securing employment as hotel workers, guides, drivers, and game scouts, people in many rural communities are negotiating or demanding the right to sustainable use of lands appropriated for national parks, rent or lease agreements with hotel and tour operators to use their traditional lands, and a percentage of park entrance fees or hotel profits. They are also demanding sole ownership of or joint partnership in campsites, cultural and handicraft centers, restaurants, lodges, and concessions such as those offering horseback riding, hiking, and fishing. Despite the rhetoric of incorporating people and parks and the democratic developments in a number of countries, old ways and power relationships die hard. A 1992 study of various ecotourism projects concluded that "the results [of participation] thus far have been disappointing, to say the least," and although there are some wonderful and exciting exceptions, this still appears to be the norm. As Peruvian activist and scholar Miguel Hilario writes, "Although indigenous peoples are considered key subjects in the ecotourism development model, they have not yet assumed roles as primary actors." Hilario points out that while indigenous peoples are typically listed as stakeholders in ecotourism, "not all stakeholders are equal." As he elaborates, "[I]ndigenous communities seem to have a comparative disadvantage in ecotourism ventures. They often lack the know-how, the market information, and most importantly, the cash to sustain any serious ecotourism business. Furthermore, they lack political and economic power to negotiate freely and evenly with governments, private entities, and international institutions. Consequently, at the end of what can be a long road of negotiations, the agreed-upon deal is generally not favorable to indigenous interests."
In recent years there were instances in Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Rwanda, and Uganda of rural people being expelled from their land to create new parks and ecotourism projects. Many people resisted moving from their traditional lands, even when they were offered compensation. As one elderly South African in the Kosi Bay area put it, "Where do these people take the right to make money out of our land? We don't want compensation, we want our land. . . . They say they want to protect nature. But aren't people also part of God's nature?" Although the ultimate outcome of many of these disputes remains unclear, the terms of discourse and forms of organizing have changed: environmental protection and the land and economic rights of rural people are now part of the debate. In these struggles, rural communities and indigenous people are building national and sometimes international alliances to demand an equitable slice of the economic pie, which now frequently includes ecotourism.
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