1
A
BSTRACT
Tourism is destructive toward host communities and their natural environment. However, the
general attitude of society toward the environment
is changing and consequently, people are
developing an appreciation for the value of responsible travel. Alternative forms of tourism have
been conceived,
such as ecotourism, and are viewed as a mean to meet the expectations of the
new tourists
. Ecotourism is a method to satisfy the concern of new tourists for environmental
conservation but it neglects one of the key factors of sustainable tourism today:
the host
communities. Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET) aims at environmental conservation but it
is also a way to empower communities, by allowing them a degree
of control over tourism
projects and their impacts. This paper reveals the varying degrees of empowerment of host
communities provided by community-based ecotourism through a meta-study analysis of six case
studies of tourism projects. Not all contemporary tourism projects
take local populations into
consideration thus the six case studies are nonrandom selections for the purpose of representing
the concept embodied in the thesis and showing its appropriateness with the new tourists’
expectations.
