Tourism growth is one of the primary drivers of economic development and is a core strategy at local and national levels to improve the lives of local communities. However, tourism can bring both advantages and disadvantages to communities and not all national strategies in tourism management are applicable or suitable in private, community-based and public sectors. Tourism is used as a main instrument of nation building in many postcolonial countries such as Namibia, South Africa, Botswana and Madagascar. Using case studies from these areas, this book examines the strategic objectives for tourism growth and how nationally-set objectives such as economic growth, increased employment, poverty reduction, black economic empowerment, environmental sustainability and reduction of regional inequalities work at the grassroots level. Challenging ongoing practices and providing new innovations for tourism development applicable to other developing countries, this study will be useful for both researchers and decision makers in tourism.

The book represents the first accessible examination of the complex connections between tourism and sustainability in southern African context. The edited book introduces relationships between tourism, sustainability and development with a range of case studies from the region, focusing especially on natural resource dependent communities in processes of transition.

This edited collection focuses on tourism development, sustainability and local change in southern Africa. The book offers a range of both conceptual and applied perspectives that address various changes in southern African tourism and community development relations. The key drivers of change that include climate change and globalization form the context for the diverse and interesting set of case studies from the region. The main conceptual grounds of the book cover sustainability, sustainable development goals (SDGs), responsibility, vulnerability, adaptation, resilience, governance, local development and inclusive growth. In this book sustainability is seen as one of the most important issues currently facing the tourism sector, affecting all types and scales of tourism operations and environments in the region. Tourism is an increasingly important economy in the southern African region and the industry is creating changes for communities and environment while also facing major challenges caused by global trends and changes. The book offers a case study driven approach to sustainability needs of tourism development in local community contexts. The case study chapters are linked through the book’s focus on sustainable tourism and local community development. Through emphasizing the need to understand both global change and local contexts in sustainable tourism development, this book is a valuable resource for all those working in the field.

This book presents an overview of different institutional arrangements for tourism, biodiversity conservation and rural poverty reduction in eastern and southern Africa. These approaches range from conservancies in Namibia, community-based organizations in Botswana, conservation enterprises in Kenya, private game reserves in South Africa, to sport hunting in Uganda and transfrontier conservation areas. The book presents a comparative analysis of these arrangements and highlights that most arrangements emerged in the 1990s through either a decentralized or centralized change trajectory that was sponsored by donors. They aim to address some of the challenges of the ‘fortress’ types of conservation by combining principles of community-based natural resource management with a neoliberal approach to conservation, evident in the use of tourism as the main mechanism for accruing benefits from wildlife. The book illustrates the empirical relevance of these novel arrangements by presenting their growth in numbers and discuss how these arrangements differ in their form. With respect to the conservation and development impacts of these arrangements, we show that they have secured large amounts of land for conservation, but also generated governance challenges and disputes on tourism benefit sharing, affecting the stability of these arrangements to generate socioeconomic and conservation benefits.

Over the last two decades the concept and practice of Local Economic Development (LED) has gained widespread acceptance around the world as a locally-based response to the challenges posed by globalization, devolution, local-level opportunities, and economic crises. Support for local economic development is now firmly on the agenda of many national governments and key international agencies. This volume examines the debates about Local Economic Development and examines some of the unfolding experiences of LED in the developing world. The focus is upon the region of southern Africa, and more especially upon post-apartheid South Africa. LED emerged in South Africa as one of the more significant post-apartheid development options being pursued by empowered localities with the overt encouragement of national government. Elsewhere in the developing world, much interest surrounds the experience of LED in post-apartheid South Africa, which is seen as a laboratory for experimentation, innovation, and learning. The seventeen chapters in this book examine the range of LED interventions that have been the basis for experimentation in the last decade, including both pro-market as well as pro-poor interventions. Key themes include debates about the most appropriate policy directions for LED, its contribution towards sustainable development, the role of social capital, cluster support, public procurement, eco-development, good governance and tourism-led LED. The book also contains a series of detailed case studies on the implementation of LED in South Africa and the wider region of southern Africa, including analyses of LED undertaken at a variety of scales from the provincial, metropolitan, and small-town level. Until now, most research on local economic development has focused on the developed world. This volume breaks new ground in applying LED policy and practices to problems specific to the developing world. It will be of interest to scholars of development studies, urban and regional planning, human geography, and urban studies.

Though conflict is normal and can never fully be prevented in the international arena, such conflicts should not lead to loss of innocent life. Tourism can offer a bottom-up approach in the mediation process and contribute to the transformation of conflicts by allowing a way to contradict official barriers motivated by religious, political, or ethnic division. Tourism has both the means and the motivation to ensure the long-term success of prevention efforts. Role and Impact of Tourism in Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation is an essential reference source that provides an approach to peace through tourism by presenting a theoretical framework of tourism dynamics in international relations, as well as a set of peacebuilding case studies that illustrate the role of tourism in violent or critical scenarios of conflict. Featuring research on topics such as cultural diversity, multicultural interaction, and international relations, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, government officials, international relations experts, academicians, students, and researchers.