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Ecotourism has emerged over the last twenty years not just as a market niche, but also as a strategy for combining development with conservation in the developing world. Ecotourism, NGOs and Development considers the basis for advocacy and argues that it is premised upon a very limited and limiting view of the potential for development. Jim Butcher examines the advocacy of tourism as sustainable development in a range of NGOs and within the general literature. The research reveals that in spite of the plethora of critical commentaries on the operation of ecotourism projects, there is generally an uncritical take on the ideological basis of the projects. This book offers a timely critique of key assumptions underlying ecotourism's status as sustainable development, arguing that ecotourism as development strategy ties the fate of some of the poorest people on the planet to localized environmental imperatives.
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Ecotourism, NGOs and Development
This book takes a critical look at the role of ecotourism in bringing about sustainable development in the developing world. Ecotourism is often advocated as a sustainable option as it combines development with an emphasis on preserving wildlife and cultures. However, as argued in this book, it also ties the development prospects for rural communities to a ‘nature first’ outlook that severely limits the prospects for substantial economic development. Ecotourism has been initiated by a range of non-governmental organisations as exemplary sustainable development in the rural developing world. This book looks at the way these NGOs advocate ecotourism, and identifies key features of this advocacy. These features – the emphasis on local community participation and on the role of local tradition, the assumption of environmental fragility and the emphasis on preserving natural capital, and the overarching assumption that development should integrate conservation and development on a local level – are critically evaluated. It is argued that ecotourism’s popularity as a development option devalues human development by tying the latter to an externally imposed conservation priority. Many authors have written critically about the record of ecotourism in successfully involving communities in development, or in conserving biodiversity. However, the general aim of this development strategy – to link the well-being of rural communities with conservation (integrated conservation and development) – is generally taken to be a normative goal. By contrast, this book questions the rationale behind ecotourism integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs), and argues that it reflects a diminished view of the potential for substantial development and liberation from poverty. Jim Butcher lectures at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent. His previous book, The Moralisation of Tourism (Routledge 2003), comprised a defence of mass tourism in the face of its many detractors.
Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility Series Editor: C. Michael Hall Professor at the Department of Tourism, University of Otago, New Zealand The aim of this series is to explore and communicate the intersections and relationships between leisure, tourism and human mobility within the social sciences. It will incorporate both traditional and new perspectives on leisure and tourism from contemporary geography, e.g. notions of identity, representation and culture, while also providing for perspectives from cognate areas such as anthropology, cultural studies, gastronomy and food studies, marketing, policy studies and political economy, regional and urban planning, and sociology, within the development of an integrated field of leisure and tourism studies. Also, incr