A Tourism Framework for Community-Driven Sustainable Livelihood: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Participatory approaches in community-driven projects are usually connected to sustainable livelihoods. Previous studies have focussed more on community-based tourism (CBT), where private investors, donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the main stakeholders, therefore, they manage and control such CBT projects. In such cases, the communities are treated as a homogenous alliance and are negligibly involved in the planning and management of the projects. This has resulted in communities not fully benefiting from tourism attractions, which are mostly located in rural areas. Communities living adjacent to tourist attractions, hence, tend not to utilize these resources for their livelihoods. Considerable studies have identified the main reasons for this situation as being poor planning and management of tourism projects, leading to the lack of participation by the communities. While it is a fact that many community tourism projects experience poor management, the institutional structures and processes through which these projects function are hardly investigated. Community participation in the development of tourism projects does not take place in a vacuum, communities are, usually, motivated by an enabling atmosphere, for example, adequate capital, to play an active part in the development of a project. The nature of a motivating capital that would influence communities to participate in tourism projects, however, is yet to be examined. Previous studies have substantially documented various benefits of tourism to communities, however, limited studies have focused on the utilization of resources from tourism activities, for …