Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in Ecotourism

Abstract

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have become major stakeholders in global conservation efforts, particularly in establishing protected areas and proposing and testing new conservation models for their management. Since the 1990s, NGOs have used ecotourism as one rationale for advocating the maintenance of protected areas worldwide. Ecotourism aims to use revenues from visitors to support conservation. In particular, community-based ecotourism aims to support conservation commonly through economic and social development of local communities. Despite the widespread involvement of NGOs in conservation through ecotourism, their precise roles and decision-making processes have not previously been studied using systematic or comparative approaches at global or national scale. There are numerous case studies of single ecotourism projects assisted by NGOs, and some of these highlight significant shortcomings with actual or potential negative effects on both biodiversity and local communities. These studies, however, have not analysed how NGOs select and define which initiatives to support, nor the factors which determine effective strategies for development of ecotourism enterprises in protected areas. Given the global scale of NGO involvement, this lack of information on NGO dynamics represents a significant gap in our current understanding of ecotourism practices. This thesis aims to address this gap.