Indigenous ecotourism in the Mayan rainforest of Palenque: empowerment issues in sustainable development
By Adrián Ramos, B. Prideaux. 2014
161 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Indigenous ecotourism in the Mayan rainforest has received little research attention. This study examines issues related to the level of empowerment in a Mayan village located near the Palenque World Heritage Site in southern Mexico. An adapted empowerment framework was used to assess community empowerment and its relationship with stakeholders’ participation by collecting the views of internal and external stakeholders in indigenous ecotourism. Using a checklist of 60 empowerment indicators, the study developed a wheel of empowerment tool that graphically illustrates and compares levels of empowerment/disempowerment in local communities. Results indicate that although there is a will from many villagers to participate in tourism, lack of knowledge, limited economic resources and the poor negotiation skills of local leaders have disempowered the community from undertaking ecotourism ventures. Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have not supported the community until recently, the private sector has played little part, and while the Mexican government is shaping the course of indigenous ecotourism with support programmes, state agencies have resisted local ecotourism development. Overall, the community fell below the midpoint on the Wheel of Empowerment Scale. These findings show a need for more effective empowerment strategies to maximise community involvement in managing cultural and natural resources for tourism development.
Subfields: General Health Professions, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13ab8db44de4f98495964960db655b0b0fb38898
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In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Community-Based Tourism in Developing Countries: A Framework for Policy Evaluation (2019, background): “Therefore, for communities to develop CBT a shift in balance between the powerful and the powerless is required [21], not only in terms of economic, psychological, and social power but also political power to drive CBT implementation [15,27] and influence public policy to support meaningful communit”
- Empowerment and resident support for tourism in rural Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): the case of Pomerania, Poland (2017, background): “Scheyvens (1999) recognizes economic empowerment as an important dimension of empowerment and Ramos and Prideaux (2014) put forth environmental empowerment as another important dimension of empowerment needed for tourism to be considered sustainable tourism.”
- Antecedents and Outcomes of Resident Empowerment through Tourism (2021, unknown): “…ongoing, and participatory processes by which individuals gain greater mastery and control over their lives and affairs and engage more in democratic participation in their communities enhancing their pride and self-esteem (Rappaport 1981, 1987; Zimmerman 1995; Zimmerman and Rappaport 1988).”