Beyond economics

Ecotourism aims not only to turn a profit, but also to help communities and protect nature

By Roger Hamilton

Imagine telling a businessman that in addition to making money and paying his employees he also had to help local communities and protect nature.

It sounds presumptuous. Yet the majority of ecolodge and ecotourism operators go into business at least in part to promote values that they consider important.

“If you don’t work with local people, you’re not doing ecotourism,” said Eduardo Nycander, founder and co-owner of Peru’s Rainforest Expeditions, at a recent IDB seminar. The company’s two ecolodges are run as a partnership with the local indigenous communities. “We get to know the local people. We drink together, go everywhere together.”

It’s a whole different world from mainstream tourism. “Nobody expects a Four Seasons Hotel to reach out to the community,” says Oliver Hillel, formerly ecotourism director of Conservation International, an organization that is carrying out an ecotourism project in Bolivia that is supported by the IDB.

But it’s not easy, particularly in the case of projects managed all or in part by local communities. The problems can start when outsiders enthusiastically promote community projects, but do little to analyze if the local residents are really capable of carrying them out. Such assessments would show that many such projects would fail in a few years unless supported by long-term grants and soft loans, according to Megan Epler Wood, president of The International Ecotourism Society (TIES).

The reality is that communities often have an understandably difficult time managing something as problematic as an enterprise in the middle of a rainforest that caters to high-end foreign tourists. One way around this is to limit the role of the community to that of shareholder, leaving management to others. This is the approach taken by the Washington, D.C.–based organization Tropical Nature. In Ecuador, for example, Tropical Nature is sponsoring a project in which 51 percent of the ownership is vested in an independent nonprofit group, with the remaining 49 percent reserved for the community.

“The people are happy with this arrangement because they don’t want to be telling members of their own community what to do,” says Tropical Nature President Peter English. “They don’t want to be in a position where they have to fire their neighbor’s uncle.”

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Date posted: January 2002

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