Integrated Conservation and Development (ICD) initiatives that seek to incorporate human needs into protected area management have become common conservation practice. A popular ICD tool is nature-based tourism, which should deliver funding for conservation and benefits to local people, thereby encouraging them to support sustainable resource management. This "ecotourism" is attractive in theory, but its performance has been understudied in practice. In particular, little is known about how benefits and costs of tourism are distributed within host communities, how tourism influences attitudes to natural resources, the environmental impacts of tourism, and how tourists differ in their impacts. This thesis investigates all of these issues, using gorilla-tracking at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP) in Uganda as a case study. The results show that whilst tourism at BINP resulted in measurable improvements in community development indicators, there were severe inequalities in the distribution of benefits between individuals according to age, gender, education, wealth, location and social networks. Tourism benefits generally outweighed tourism costs, encouraging positive attitudes to the industry. However, many people did not feel compensated for costs of conservation, because benefits were inappropriate or because they were not seen as linked to conservation. Tourism paid for park management, but tourists were found to represent a greater disease threat to gorillas than previously realised because encounters were illegally close and some tourists were unwell. Comparing the performance of tourists, older women were found to leave the most money in the local economy, whereas younger tourists posed the greatest disease threat to gorillas. Overall, tourism at BINP delivered surprisingly well on some of the promises of ecotourism. Nonetheless, considerable conflicts, risks and inequalities were identified. The thesis concludes by presenting a series of recommendations designed to improve the performance of tourism at BINP, and by discussing wider theoretical implications of the study.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

To date there has been a limited amount of research and critical debate on the relationships between tourism initiatives, poverty alleviation and rural livelihoods. In addition, the success or otherwise of tourism ventures in reducing poverty and enhancing livelihoods has been difficult to evaluate due to a general lack of effective assessment and monitoring methods. This thesis contributes to knowledge and to the literature in two key areas. First, it develops and tests a replicable, structured, integrated assessment protocol by which to assess more accurately the impacts of tourism initiatives that purport to deliver net livelihood benefits to communities living adjacent to or within a tourism destination. The approach evaluates the relationships, processes, impact types and their relative importance, patterns of interaction and their relation to poverty reduction and the loss or enhancement of rural livelihoods by using a carefully structured combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques. Second, the thesis introduces, defines and examines an alternative way of approaching the relationships between tourism stakeholders. This has been achieved through drawing on the knowledge and critical understanding gained by the study including two community, public, private partnership case studies conducted in Maputaland, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The research identifies a range of characteristics that contribute to creating the optimal scenario for successful, sustainable and responsible Community Benefit Tourism Initiatives (CBTIs). The study considers the roles of key stakeholders in CBTIs: government, the private sector, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and communities. It identifies the critical components of CBTI development, the potential problems associated with CBTIs and some of their possible solutions by which the private sector, governments and NGOs may successfully deliver a range of livelihood and other benefits to communities in the future.

No description available.

No description available.