Ecotourism and Natural Resources in Dominica

Abstract

Sarrasin, B. & Tardif, J. (2012). Ecotourism and Natural Resources in Dominica : Co-management as an Innovative Practice. Téoros, , 85-90. doi:10.7202/1036568ar Résumé de l'article Tourism is one of the major outcomes of globalization, which also brings new challenges to local authorities. In this perspective, co-management could be analyzed as an innovative practice in promoting natural resources-oriented tourism. Moreover, it raises the following question: how does power sharing -on which co-management is basedcontribute to local development? This question could be answered through a case study using political ecology which could contribute to renew the reading of ecotourism through an innovative analytical framework. Protected areas are a major component of the biodiversity conservation strategy of most countries. Far from being neutral, their creation, which is a highly political issue, is generally accompanied by economic, social and environmental changes (Brechin et al., 2007;West et al., 2006). Often previously used by local communities for decades, their sudden appearance and the ensuing new rules combine to modify local and regional dynamics, sometimes drastically (Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2004a). As a result, even though protected areas can contribute in some cases to both biodiversity conservation and improved living conditions in certain communities, they are very often the cause of increased poverty levels, particularly if rural communities are forbidden to carry out some of the traditional or non-traditional activities on which their collective welfare depends (CBD, 2008; Scherl et al., 2004).It is in this context that ecotourism is presented as a panacea for reconciling economic development, environmental protection and the collective welfare of communities (Honey, 2008; WTO and UNEP, 2002;Goodwin, 1996). Ecotourism is a complex phenomenon dependent on quality natural resources and influenced in particular by developments in the tourism industry across various scales (Jamal and Stronza, 2009). For Hawkins and Mann (2007: 352-353), recognition that tourism development is a multisectoral and multidimensional process is the most important lesson to be drawn from the literature of the past 25 years. This context led Twining-Ward (2004, 2005) to suggest that the analysis of tourism activities would stand to gain if conducted from the perspective of socio-ecological systems -where human beings and ecosystems form an integrated system -so as to reflect all the complexity of the issues in this sector. This is particularly important when the destination is environmentally sensitive, as is often the case for ecotourism projects implemented in protected areas of countries in the South (Honey, 2008). How can political ecology, which is devoted to interactions between society and the environment, be innovative in renewing the analysis of natural resource management challenges, more specifically in a context of ecotourism development?The main goal of this article is to identify certain innovative resour...