Johannesburg — When the United Nations declared 2002 the Year of Ecotourism, the world body was recognising what is now a common assumption in many parts of the developing world: that this form of travel has become a force for promoting economic growth, rural development and the alleviation of poverty.
This view of the role of "ecotourism" - using the word to refer to various forms of nature-based travel that are kind to the ecosystems in which they operate and simultaneously create substantial benefit for local residents - topped the agenda of the Ecotourism Summit in Montreal in May 2002.
The growing reliance on various forms of nature based tourism to regenerate rural economies in many developing countries is inextricably linked to a new set of principles regarding the conservation and protection of wild animals and plants.
The new paradigm does away with the old conservation approach that relied on fencing areas of high biological diversity and preventing the natural resources from being used by local residents or outside commercial interests. Instead it advocates that wild resources should be harvested and commercialised in ways that improve the livelihoods of local people.
The earth's assets, says the new approach, can be used to generate significant benefit for local people without destroying the natural resources of a protected area. In fact, the new wisdom contends that this is the only way to ensure popular support and longevity for the national parks and game reserves in which much of the world's biodiversity is now being conserved.
This paradigm shift is clearly articulated in the March 2000 report, "Putting Poverty at the Heart of the Tourism Agenda", published by the London-based Overseas Development Institute: "Since the mid-1980s, interest in 'green' tourism, eco-tourism and community tourism has grown rapidly among decision-makers, practitioners and advocates...
"Tourism has become an important opportunity to diversify local economies.
It can develop in poor and marginal areas with few other export and diversification options. Remote areas particularly attract tourists because of their high cultural, wildlife and landscape value... It offers labour-intensive and small-scale opportunities compared with other non-agricultural activities, employs a high proportion of women, and values natural resources and culture, which may feature among the few assets belonging to the poor."
Yet, although there is widespread optimism about the poverty alleviation prospects for co-operative arrangements between people, parks and ecotourism, precious little has been done to actually measure and quantify the effects that these kinds of commercial activities have on rural peoples' livelihoods.
A recent study commissioned by the Ford Foundation in southern Africa has helped fill this vacuum. The study examines the various streams of material benefit that flow into the coffers of rural families who live in or near the protected areas from a network of commercial ecotourism businesses operating in the area.
The report on the study, conducted for Ford by an agency called Mafisa Research and Planning, looked at the economics of game lodges based in game reserves in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique. It provides some important and surprising findings, highlighting the potential for people and park partnerships to improve rural livelihoods through responsible forms of nature-based travel.
The study is useful because it goes beyond the rhetoric of the new people-and-parks/ecotourism paradigm. Instead of simply restating the broad principle that people-friendly conservation and environmentally friendly forms of travel are the best and most productive forms of land use in resource-rich landscapes, the study seeks to quantify the hard impacts that these kinds of enterprises have on the local economies in which they operate. It goes on to suggest ways in which these positive economic impacts can be maximised to ensure that conservation and nature-based tourism contribute in a significant way to social development.
The study looked in considerable detail at the performance of some 30 lodges in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa. It identified three specific "streams of benefit" that flow from these into the rural economy. These are wages, rentals or lease fees paid to local people for the use of their communal land and natural resources, and payments to local residents who provide services such as crafts, vegetables, building maintenance and other "downstream" small business activities.
The first and probably most important finding is that, in most cases, the returns generated by these lodges for local residents are much smaller than the figures suggested in the rhetoric about the benefits of ecotourism and people-friendly conservation.
It would appear that conservationists have sometimes exaggerated the scale of benefits these businesses can deliver to rural economies in a bid to mobilise popular support for wildlife protection. The study argues that this is a short-sighted approach because it is then just a matter of time before a gap is created between the expectations of local residents and the actual performance of ecotourism establishments. A more effective approach, says the report, would be to accurately predict the limited impacts that nature-based tourism can generate and then try to optimise these so that they have a combined positive impact.
The study finds that the developmental yield of these commercial establishments varies considerably from region to region. But it notes that, almost without exception, the wage bill for a poorly paid workforce is the main type of benefit that these ecotourism plants inject into the rural economy. In fact this "stream of benefit" is on average three times greater than rentals that are often paid to the local community for the use of their land and up to 20 times greater than fees paid to local entrepreneurs for outsourced services to the ecotourism enterprise.
The study thus concurs with Krishna Ghimire and Michel Pimbert, editors of a new book about the impacts of ecotourism on local livelihoods published by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. These commentators note that "measures to combat poverty induced by a protected area scheme in a developing country usually emphasize the creation of full or part-time jobs in, for example, the tourism and crafts sector. The problem is that for most rural people, and particularly for the weak and vulnerable, employment is only one component of livelihood."
There are, however, countervailing examples in the southern Africa region which provide vital lessons about the ways ecotourism enterprises can generate a more significant mix of benefits that make a positive impact on the local economy.
In essence, the Mafisa/Ford report notes that where ecotourism enterprises operate in a policy and human rights environment which clearly grants local people both rights to use natural resources and strong land tenure rights, the combinations of benefit streams that flow from the commercial enterprises will be large enough to make a significant difference to the livelihoods of residents.
The message is simple but vital. Where local residents have strong rights over wildlife and other natural resources, they can enter into negotiations with private sector tourism developers to ensure the following:
* Better conditions of employment and wages.
* Employment practices that provide work for vulnerable people in the community, such as single mothers.
* Market-related rentals and lease fees for the lodge's use of the land.
* Joint venture arrangements in which local residents also receive a share of the profits generated by the lodge.
* Requirements that the lodge company makes use of local crafters, cultural groups, construction teams and other forms of outsourced activity.
* Rights to harvest local resources including the (highly emotive and controversial) right to conduct trophy hunts for large mammals such as elephant and buffalo.
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When these streams of benefit are all activated, maximised and combined, ecotourism begins to change the quality of local peoples' lives. Where tenure and use rights are weak or poorly defined, the opposite situation applies: all that flows to local residents are low wages for a small number of menial posts in the enterprise.
The Ford study thus concludes that: "wages are always a key source of revenue flows from ecotourism enterprises to local people ... in addition ecotourism establishments provide employment opportunities for women and other vulnerable groups in rural society. This allows poor households to receive direct payments from the lodge whereas lease fees or rentals are often intercepted by local elites or government structures before they reach the household.
"In all the lodges surveyed, skilled outsiders captured a disproportionate percentage of the wage bill. However, the case studies show that where there is a devolution of land or other resource rights, local residents have an important bargaining platform from which they are able to structure employment arrangements that optimise their benefit from wages."
It adds that, where there is a structured system of rights for local people and a cooperative private sector partner, local communities are in a position to negotiate market-related rentals for land on which tourism enterprises are located. They can also ensure contractual obligations requiring the business to buy local goods and services. Such arrangements can sometimes more than double the tangible benefits that ecotourism enterprises inject into a local economy through their wage bill.
Ecotourism and people-friendly conservation can indeed improve the lives of the rural poor in many parts of the world, says the study, but only where there is careful and concrete planning, an avoidance of hyped-up rhetoric about the wonders of ecotourism and, above all, an insistence on basic human rights.
Eddie Koch is a director of Mafisa Research and Planning and an author of the Ford Foundation report referred to in this article.
