A misguided quest: community-based tourism in Latin America

This paper looks at the key issues surrounding community-based tourism in Latin America. The authors argue that tourism can help reduce poverty in Latin America, but community-based tourism (CBT) is not the answer. Instead, communities should be helped to access mainstream tourism markets. Many development practitioners see a key role for tourism in regional development. But many communities and development practitioners believe that mainstream tourism exacerbates the exclusion of vulnerable groups and commodifies indigenous culture.

Key points highlighted include:

• many community-based tourist initiatives are ineffective at reducing poverty at scale.
• recent research suggests sizeable and sustainable transfers of benefits from affluent tourists to poor communities are possible – but only if practitioners recognise that it is linkages with, and not protection from, the mainstream industry that benefit poor communities
• if mainstream tourism is part of the solution, it is important to link poor people to the major tourist flows rather than pursue a quest for ‘alternative’ tourism
• there are diverse ways for the poor to link to mainstream tourism. In vibrant, low-income economies more jobs for poor people are generated by craft stalls, taxis and local food supplies than by hotels and restaurants. In this context, removing barriers to enterprise is an effective way of spreading the benefits
• development practitioners who focus on a critique of mainstream tourism may be doing local communities a disservice