Factors of community participation that explain the benefits of ecotourism

Abstract

The sustainability of ecotourism initiatives represents a major challenge. The aim of this study is to enhance our understanding of how community participation in ecotourism management can contribute toward achieving more sustainable results by identifying key factors that make it possible to potentiate a broader range of economic, social and environmental objectives. Based on the theory of collaborative planning and the strategic focus of community tourism, our work adopted a mixed approach to compare and explain the differences between two local cooperatives on the coast of the state of Nayarit, Mexico. The results reveal statistically-significant differences between the benefits obtained through ecotourism and identify the factors that foment active community participation by local residents that, in turn, generates positive correlations with those benefits. Findings were supported by qualitative interviews with external informants. Our conclusion is that the level of benefits obtained can be reasonably explained by a set of six key factors.

Keywords

• Ecotourism
• Community tourism
• Management
• Community participation
• Sustainability