Building the capability to manage tourism as support for the Aichi Target (original) (raw)
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EDITORIAL: Protected Area Tourism and the Aichi Targets
PARKS, 2012
In 2010, the Convention on Biological Diversity developed a new strategic plan to enhance international efforts at stopping degradation and promoting sustainable use of the world's biological heritage. These twenty 'Aichi Targets' are to be attained by 2020. Domestic and international tourism and visitation to protected areas is significant, growing, and can generate both positive and negative environmental impacts. This issue of PARKS is focused on the potential contributions to achieving the Aichi Targets from tourism and visitation. Tourism is highly relevant to biodiversity conservation and protected area management and planning, and can contribute to several of the Aichi targets. Authors in this issue explore how, for example, tourism can help achieve public awareness of biodiversity values and opportunities for conservation, keep impacts within safe ecological limits, increase global coverage of protected areas, and promote fair and equitable sharing of benefits from tourism and biodiversity.
The role of tourism and visitation in parks and protected areas has accelerated in the past quarter century and will continue to do so, not only because of increased travel activity but also because of the emphasis it receives as a strategy to assist local economic development and as a source of financing for biodiversity protection. Yet, managers are poorly prepared to manage tourism to meet biodiversity and visitor experiences objectives. Enhancing professional competencies is an often argued approach for more effective management, but focusing on competencies alone while raising capacity is not sufficient to improve performance. Here, we suggest managers need greater awareness and opportunity to exercise those competencies and to perform at a higher level. In this paper, we show how insights from women's empowerment theory can enable male and female managers to respond to complex and dynamic natural resource and tourism challenges by presenting a framework for enhancing awareness and expanding managers' power in four dimensions: Power to, Power with, Power within and Power over.
Tourism and protected areas: motives, actors and processes
International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystems Services & Management, 2006
SUMMARY Following the paradigm shift in nature conservation policy towards the inclusion of local inhabitants in the planning and management of protected areas, tourism is emphasised as a means to achieve economic development in peripheral areas. Governance issues and the real impacts from tourism on development are thus often under scrutiny. This article focuses on the role of tourism in
Combining the goals of conservation, tourism and livelihoods in the management of protected areas
SLU, Dept. of Urban and Rural Development, 2020
The liberal conservation agenda promotes the incorporation of human needs into the management of Protected Areas (PAs). Across the globe, nature-based tourism has been among the suggested tools of promoting sustainable conservation together with development of the local communities living around the PAs. This exploratory study was conducted to contribute to improved management practices of PAs by using the Volcanoes National Park (VNP) in Northern Rwanda as a case study to explore whether the tourism practices there can help to achieve the reconciliation between conservation and the local people's livelihoods goals. The study has the main objective of understanding the benefits and constraints of combining the goals of conservation, tourism and livelihoods by using the VNP as a Case Study. The study has adopted a qualitative approach and was based on interviews and literature review as methods of data collection. The study has been conducted during the global pandemic (COVID-19), therefore, phone interviews were used to interview 14 participants in relation to the VNP management, from three different categories of ecotourism stakeholders. The categories are: (1) the government and/or VNP management staff as the Director of VNP; (2) Conservation NGOs like the top management staff of the Diana Fossey Gorilla Fund International and the conservation workers like the Mountain Gorilla Trackers; (3) the local community which, in turn, is also divided into four subcategories: (a) the local institution representatives like the village leader; (b) members of different Community-Based Organisation (CBO) or cooperatives; (c) local people employed by ecotourism projects; and (d) ordinary villagers or farmers. The data collected were transcribed, translated and analysed qualitatively. The results of this study showed that the combination of the goals of conservation, tourism and livelihoods is difficult to achieve to a practice in the context of VNP. The goals of tourism and conservation have been achieved to a higher degree, in comparison to those of the local community's livelihoods. The study suggests that the mixed success of the linkage is based on the fact that the tourism attraction (VNP) is owned and run by the government which considers the tourism industry as its number one foreign currency earner. Though the major benefits of the linkage between tourism, conservation and livelihood are mostly macroeconomic growth, different initiatives of conservation NGOs and the Tourism Revenue Sharing scheme have brought some positive changes in both conservation of the park and the local community's livelihood diversification. This study, however, shed more light on the challenges such as lack of capacity and power for the local community which in turn limit them from effectively participating in different ecotourism processes such as elaboration and implementation of the management and conservation policies; collection and investment of tourism revenues, etc. The current top-down approach of managing the VNP makes the future of the park conservation uncertain. The study showed that, even though the number of cases is decreasing, illegal activities in the park still exist, the community still depend on the park for basic needs, due to lack of infrastructures like water and electricity. Therefore, the study suggests a shift from a top-down approach to decentralised natural resources management. The decentralisation is believed to empower the local community so that they will be able to manage and use the resources from the park. As a result, the existing benefit leakage among the ecotourism stakeholders could be decreased as well.