Walker, Kaye (2008) Tools to enhance community capacity to critically evaluate tourism activities. In: Moscardo, Gianna, (ed.) Building Community Capacity for Tourism Development. CAB International, Oxfordshire, UK, pp. 86-100.

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Abstract

This chapter discusses a new approach and framework in sustainable tourism and associated ecotourism development. This approach provides the community with the opportunity to evaluate the outcomes of a tourist activity with respect to the tourists' recognition and incorporation of, and accord with, the community's own values. It does this by providing communities and ecotourism operators, local governments and tourism agencies and consultants with a tool to enhance their understanding of the personal outcomes and significant values of the tourists participating in the ecotourism experience. This subsequently provides a link between the community and the tourist, while utilizing the involvement of the external tourism operators. Thus, this approach provides the opportunity for communities already experiencing ecotourism to better understand and evaluate the tourism activity and experience. By utilizing the ecotourism operations already functioning within their community and region, it takes advantage of their current potential for community capacity building and effectively provides a feedback loop in Moscardo's model between the latter stage of building community capacity for tourism with the earlier stage to create tourism knowledge and awareness. This approach is intended to be incorporated as part of the sustainable tourism process, clearly integrating the community capacity-building potential with the conduct of ecotourism. It exploits the interpretive component of ecotourism operations as the conduit and linkage between the tourist and the community through the facilitation, assessment and comparison of social values. Because of the fundamental nature of the interpretive component in ecotourism operations, it is suggested this approach can be further encouraged and implemented via ecotourism and sustainability accreditation programmes. In this chapter, the theoretical premise for this approach will be discussed and the development of the framework linking the community to the tourist. This establishes the importance of the identification of community values to community capacity building within the sustainability concept. This is followed by considering the potential development of the framework as a tool for community capacity building if used in conjunction with ecotourism operations already or potentially occurring and involving remote communities who have little other resources from which to learn about tourism and tourists.

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