Exploring the potential impacts of tourism development on social and ecological change in the Solomon Islands

Abstract

Pacific Island communities may be vulnerable to negative impacts of economic development, which is often considered a strategy for reducing vulnerability to environmental change. Studies that evaluate potential impacts of economic development in isolated communities may be inaccurate to only focus on asking people to anticipate impacts of phenomena they have had minimal exposure to. We used an open-ended approach to evaluate how communities in the Solomon Islands perceived change, and used this information to anticipate potential impacts of the government's plans to develop tourism. Our results showed mostly negative expectations of change, particularly socio-cultural, which was perceived as being driven by diminishing social capital, foreign influence, and economic development. Despite minimal exposure, locals supported tourism and had more positive expectations of change associated with this activity. Our findings emphasize the need for locally appropriate planning to ensure intended positive impacts of tourism and other forms of economic development.

Social capital plays a central role in transitions to sportfishing tourism in small-scale fishing communities in Papua New Guinea

“…Overall, people in our study communities were enthusiastic about becoming more involved in sportfishing tourism. It is not uncommon for communities in the early stages of tourism development to be supportive of the new opportunities it presents (Diedrich and Aswani 2016). However, it is important to consider the limitation that our study only looked at perceptions of becoming involved in tourism, which may not translate directly into actual involvement.…”

“…Another important consideration is that, where some research in small Pacific Islands has suggested communities are relatively resilient to environmental change due to their accumulated experience of adapting to high environmental variability (Campbell 2009;Gough et al 2010), studies have also shown that, due to their social isolation, they may be more vulnerable to recent changes brought about by economic development, tourism, and globalisation (Lauer et al 2013;Butler et al 2014;Diedrich and Aswani 2016). Moreover, due to the presence of customary tenure, any form of local alteration or redistribution of natural resource rights due to tourism or other activities could lead to conflict and confrontations (Sofield 1996;Banks 2008;Aswani et al 2015).…”

Disaggregating ecosystem service values and priorities by wealth, age, and education

“…Tourism, based on recreational ecosystem services, is a key industry in the western Indian Ocean. Yet, tourism, as a strategy for reducing environmental vulnerability through economic development, may not only have negative social impacts (Diedrich and Aswani, 2016), but may actually not be accessible or desired by fishers highly vulnerable to environmental change. It is striking that recreational benefits were not valued or prioritized more by fishers, given the importance of tourism in the region.…”

Potentiality of Islands Based Tourism in Bangladesh: A Qualitative View from Existing Literature

“…The small islands in China have established an evidence for the other island based destinations as they earn money through sharing their fishing cultures as well as the products produced by the locals transfer an idea of impact of tourism development on the physical and social structure of the island communities (Su et al, 2017). It is found that the tourism industry will impact the life of the local people in some way whether the level of exposure of the local culture which actually demand for enacting majority of the people with the direct economic activities (Diedrich and Aswani, 2016).…”