Community-based ecotourism: Opportunities and difficulties for local communities and link to conservation

This chapter discusses issues associated with a bottom-up community-based ecotourism (CBET) initiative located in a remote area of Papua New Guinea (PN G). The chapter illustrates how a small-scale tourism project is able to make a positive economic contribution to a local community as well as having positive impacts on local environmental attitudes and behaviours (see Chapters 15 and 16 for further examples of tourism development in remote areas of New Guinea). In the CBET project discussed in this chapter, the pro-environmental attitude that emerged in the local community appears to be a product of the economic value generated by tourism and the associated realisation that the environment had a value beyond that of providing food and other resources such as traditional medicines . The objective of this chapter is to examine how a successful bottom-up CBET project has benefited both the community and the environment. After a brief review of the relevant CBET literature, the chapter reports on the economic and environmental aspects of the bottom-up CBET project that was initiated by members of the Waluma West Ward (hereafter referred to as Waluma) community. The outcomes noted in Waluma are then compared to results of similar CBET ventures in two nearby villages to ascertain the potential and limitations for community development and conservation of the bottom-up approach to CBET.