Community involvement in tourism development

One of the key issues of sustainable tourism development is community benefit. Without community benefit tourism can no way be sustainable.
To make a project viable, involvement of local community in project planning, formulation and implementation is necessary.
In the last decade, tourism has evolved as a significant economic development issue for many communities of countries which have developed their tourism, specially Kenya, Senegal, Samoa, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Peru, Venezuela and Jamaica.
Community-based tourism development is a strategy that is applied by tourism development planners and authorities to mobilise communities into action for broadening the scope of offerings in the industry.
The main goal is to make socio-economic empowerment and 'value-added experience' for domestic as well as foreign tourists.
Involvements of local community unlock many new niche destinations specially for nature, culture & heritage, archaeology and history loving tourists.
This year the UNWTO earmarked the world tourism day theme 'Tourism and Community Development'. The fundamental of the theme is community-inclusive tourism development or community driven tourism development.
Tourism as an industry it employs many dimensions including our local culture, tangible and intangible heritages and the people itself.  Local community knows best the local history, culture and heritage than people from outside.
There are many positive aspects of involving the local community in tourism development. Bangladesh still being nascent in terms of tourism development can take initiative for strong community development prior to go for any mega tourism project implementation.
Community involvements mean community awareness, seeking their opinion and effectively implement their recommendations so that they can have benefit out of tourism activities.
Whenever the local people are aware of any project, they fully co-operate in tourism project implementation like sharing resources at their disposal, providing security to tourists and promoting the local culture and heritage. On the other hand, benefit will trickle down to the local community.
Whenever local community is involved in tourism activities, many jobs, directly and indirectly, are created. Community based tourism development empowers local people to be more aware of the value of their community resources such as their culture, heritage, cuisine and lifestyle. It mobilizes them to convert these into income generating projects while offering a more diverse and worthwhile experience to visitors.
Every citizen is a potential business partner to be trained in small and medium business enterprise, environmental awareness, product development and marketing. This type of community based tourism promotes a sense of ownership which augments well for the industry's sustainability.
Community based tourism enables the tourists to discover the local habitats and wildlife, and encourage them to celebrate and respect traditional cultures, rituals and wisdom. The community will be aware of the commercial and social value of their natural, cultural and archaeological heritage through tourism activities. And this will foster community based conservation of their resources.
Our past experience does make it amply clear that the local community involvement play a key role in the sustenance of tourism projects. Recently, a visit to four renowned cultural heritage sites of Bangladesh stimulated my idea how local people can carry forward a project when they understand that their livelihood and dignity are linked to it. The visited sites are Paharpur world heritage site in Naogaon district, Mahasthangarh in Bogra, Kantajeu Temple in Dinajpur and Shait Gambud Mosque world heritage site in Bagerhat district.  Here local people are more aware of the need for preserving their heritage sites as well as earning their livelihood. They are found now more enthusiastic about their heritages than what was one decade earlier. Once local people can perceive the value of heritage as well as their role, they will definitely save those for their posterity. Unfortunately, local community was ignored earlier in the country in many ways. Sometimes local community remained in dark during the project formulation and implementation. That's why many projects had failed.
Local community sometimes does not understand the important values of local culture and heritages. That's why they tend to cause harm to the heritages. If awareness programme is taken by the government or NGOs to make them aware of the values of heritage and cultural sites and traditional food, the local community themselves would try to preserve those valuable heritages and try to promote it. But how long they will preserve it, if their livelihoods are not linked to the same? In this regard, tourism planners and authorities must consider their livelihood issues. Their livelihood as well preserving the culture and heritage must have a good synergy. Local people must be provided training for enhancing their skills like tour guides, food and beverage production, arts and artisan, replica or souvenir production etc, also the promotion technique of their local uniqueness. What is their uniqueness in terms of culture like traditional dance, music, folks must be promoted. Here relevant training needs to be provided to the local people so that they can promote and market those to the tourists. These kinds of training do not have much financial involvement. Local or district administration may itself take the programme or assign NGOs to impart training to local people. Thus, local people will be more skilled, employment will be generated. There will be more other direct and indirect benefit in the localities concerned.
Local people are the proprietor of culture and heritage, their indigenous and empirical knowledge can also be preserved through proper documentations. Their indigenous knowledge may be also shared to tourists as a part of community tourism.  Here, it is necessary to recognise one critical factor that the value of cultural heritage is defined by the communities themselves -- they are the ones who recognise how culture and heritage is manifested. Hence, we need a bottom-up approach for community tourism development. Community tourism can help with this approach, raise awareness of the uniqueness and importance of culture and heritage, and strengthen a sense of pride among locals, while generating income for community members. It can be a win-win situation.
 Bangladesh is an agricultural dominated country and its perpetual rural setting and common people are the main driving forces for community tourism development. The typical village and the traditional culture and heritage of Bangladesh are the main attraction for the foreign tourists.  For the community based tourism development, we must focus these issues and with utmost care we need to involve the local people. Primarily, we can initiate some pilot projects in some particular areas where our landmark tourist attractions are located. We must also set rules and regulations so that benefit does not leak out from local community to other areas by middle men. Otherwise, the effort of community tourism development will go in vain. Here, local administration, tour operators and tourism service providers of the country must put in concerted efforts. There should be a clear policy guideline of the concerned tourism development authorities. Once the community tourism development effort is successful in a particular area, it could be successfully replicated in other areas of the country.
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The writer is a tourism analyst who work in BPC.