Collaboration and community participation are crucial for securing sustainable tourism and highlight the need to listen and respond to the broad range of stakeholders’ voices, opinions, and concerns. These concepts dominated the discourse of sustainable-responsible tourism and gave rise to collaboration theory as well as various types of community participation. Many scholars in both Western and emerging economies have employed these concepts; however, there is limited research on how they apply in the Nigerian tourism industry. Therefore, this exploratory research discusses collaboration and community participation in tourism development in Nigeria, using the Southeastern region as a case study. In this area, tourism is in the early phase of growth. The paper reports on interviews and focus group discussions used to interact with tourism stakeholders in the region (traditional rulers, men, women, and youth representatives, chief priests, security agents, and tourism officials). Results showed that while the stakeholders are willing to collaborate, challenges affecting their efforts include autocratic governance structures leading to mistrust, clash of responsibilities, inadequate funding for security, lack of tourism awareness and little respect for local culture. The paper concludes that to develop a resident-friendly tourism destination and sustain collaboration and community participation, stakeholders require education about tourism and opportunities to participate in planning.

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The usefulness of wood to mankind varies from place to place, community to community, state to state, and nation to nation. Wood is a natural product, which is one of the components of biodiversity and a bio-product that serves numerous purposes to mankind. Such multifunctional purposes include those of sociopolitical, economic, religious, and cultural aspects of man. This article examines some traditional aspects of wood consumption in Anaocha Local Government Area of Anambra State, Nigeria, with a view to ascertaining the uses to which the people put wood as a by-product of the trees around them. Indepth interview, on-the-site observation, and focused group discussion were used to elicit information from knowledgeable elders, artisans, and wood vendors in different towns that make up the local government area. This research brings to limelight aspects of wood consumption in Anaocha and lends credence to the belief that wood is still the major source of revenue and energy in rural areas, probably because it is a free gift of nature. The research findings show that modernization has not completely eroded the value of wood in the study area.

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