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Ecotourism is increasingly accepted as a suitable alternative for sustaining rural livelihoods. In spite of this trend, quantitative assessments of relationships between household assets and ecotourism choices, and the policy implications thereof, currently account for only a negligible number of studies in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper contributes to this evidence gap by analyzing the extent to which households’ assets drive ecotourism choices on a representative sample of 200 households in Cameroon. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the Human Development Index (HDI) were used to construct indices for ecotourism choices. The ordinary least square and logit models were also employed to estimate the effect of various household assets on ecotourism choices. A high preference was observed for the production and sale of arts and crafts items and the promotion of cultural heritage sites as key ecotourism choices. More women are found to participate in conservation education, as opposed to culture-related activities such as arts and crafts. Access to education and training were inversely related to cultural festival promotion. The results suggest the need to: (i) stem the overdependence on conservation sites for wood supply to the arts and crafts sector, (ii) enforce endogenous cultural institutional regulations, including those that increase female participation in guiding future ecotourism choices. This paper contributes to ecotourism development and conservation theory, with regards to unbundling household level predictors of ecotourism choices, and has implications on the design of policies to implement environmentally less-demanding ecotourism activities.

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Community participation in rural development is no longer a new terminology in the development lexicon of developing countries. The Central Ejagham Community, in response to their development problems and the inability of the government to improve on the situation took a bold step by participating in development programmes in order to add value to their lives and to secure a better future for the community. The aim of this study is to examine the barriers was strategies to overcome them so as to enhance community participation in Central Ejagham. The paper adopts qualitative methods such as interviews, focus group discussions, detailed field observations which were complemented by secondary data sources and content analysis. We observe that the level of participation in a majority of the projects falls either within the "tokenism" or the "citizen control" rungs of Sherry Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation. In addition, although "tokenism" rung projects in Central Ejagham receive much financial and technical support, although they are saddled with commitment-related challenges. Conversely, projects at the "citizen control" rung are characterized by significant commitment but are hampered by limited (financial and technical) resources implying that meaningful development could not be registered for such projects. To further enhance community participation, we recommend that projects at the "tokenism" rung which are generally viable in terms of financial and technical capacity be stepped up to the "citizen control" level, in order to guarantee maximum participation for better results. In addition, we suggest that the legislative arm of the government should introduce a bill on the need to effectively support community developmental efforts. Finally, a platform to guarantee the sustainability of projects and to ensure the adequate dissemination of information on sourcing for external funding to support projects should be introduced.