SUBJECT: Biodiversity Protection through Community Ecotourism in the Ecuadorian Chocó
AUTHOR: Mary Finn, University of California

SUMMARY: The author describes the difficulties encountered during the development of a community ecotourism operation in the Ecuadorian Chocó, and asks for more research into the social and cultural aspects of such projects, to determine whether adaptive management methods may help increase their success rate.

KEYWORDS: Ecotourism, pitfalls, biodiversity, social issues.

Community ecotourism offers significant potential for promoting conservation and protecting biodiversity, but for this potential to be fulfilled - and sustained - strategies are needed to address underlying social issues as well as biological and financial ones. Ways must be found to create projects, organizations, and even networks, which learn from the past and from each other, and improve and adapt (Salafsky et al.). And measures must be taken to ensure that all important stakeholder groups - community members, tourism professionals, conservation biologists, and community development specialists - collaborate effectively together in ecotourism planning, implementation and on-going monitoring.

These conclusions come from direct experience with a community ecotourism project in the Ecuadorian Chocó. This community owns several hundred hectares of montane cloud forest in one of the most diverse bioregions in the world. Their ecotourism project was “bootstrapped” with significant volunteer effort and minimal outside funding. Scarce funds were thus directed to the most urgent, short-term needs - i.e., building infrastructure, training guides, cooks and administrators, and promotion. Later funding was obtained for specific conservation activities such as reforesting and additional land purchases. But it was much more difficult to find funding for the less tangible, but nonetheless crucial, tasks of leadership training and community development.

The ecotourism project has had many positive impacts on biodiversity protection. Most importantly, locals realized their forest was most valuable left intact. They prohibited clear-cutting (slowing habit loss) and hunting, and restricted agricultural activities, expecting ecotourism to offset the loss of this income. However, when expected ecotourism income did not meet expectations, many were disillusioned. And without effective skills for managing conflict - and for learning from and adapting to past mistakes - these problems remain unresolved, and now threaten community unity and the ecotourism/conservation project.

Biodiversity protection was also sometimes given a lower priority to income-producing activities. A typical incident involved a local guide who chopped down the small tree in which a spectacled bear cub (an endemic, endangered species) was stranded, in order to give visitors a good look at the animal. Another involved a trail built without a biological survey or impact analysis. Increased human presence disturbed a local herd of wild pigs, displacing them to lower elevations where many were hunted by poachers. The community also had difficulty enforcing norms for visitors, including some whose insensitive behaviour (loud parties, drinking, overt sexual behaviour) threatened local culture and social systems, if not biodiversity. Traditional authoritarian leadership and cultural biases against verbal directness discouraged open discussion of these problems, so that the community has been prevented from learning from and correcting these mistakes.

Many community ecotourism operations fail within the first years, and I suggest that research is needed into the social and cultural aspects of both successful and “failed” projects, to determine whether adaptive management methods may help increase the success rate, in terms of all the important objectives, including the protection of biodiversity.

References:

Salafsky, N., Margoluis R., and Redford K. Adaptive Management: A Tool for Conservation Practitioners. Washington, D.C.: Biodiversity Support Program.