Abstract
The use of sustainability indicators is not new to tourism. Sustainability indicators can be crucial to policy formulation, strategy development, and continuous learning and adaptation at any level of sustainable tourism development: from global to local. However, in community-based tourism (CBT) cases, local communities are usually not empowered to manage or operate these indicator systems by and for themselves. In most cases of donor-funded CBT initiatives, sustainability indicators are developed and used by donors or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for performance management and progress reporting purposes. This top-down quantitative approach, mainly focusing on economic indicators, often ignores the voice of the local community. In other cases of academic research where bottom-up participatory approaches are employed, local communities may be involved in the process of indicator development as participants but usually are not been given the opportunity to operate the indicator system independently. This is because such systems are not designed for local communities as end-users, but rather, they are seen as participants for data collection.
The irony of these approaches is that the local community, who will be running their CBT ventures themselves once donors and NGOs handover the project to them and the academic researchers are done with their experiments, would not be able to use or benefit from such indicators. However, for long-term sustainability, local communities should be able to evaluate the sustainability of the CBT projects in terms of ‘what you cannot measure you cannot manage’. This PhD study describes a methodological procedure for developing and implementing a local community-operated grass-roots level CBT sustainability indicator system in Boga Lake, Bangladesh. The sixteen-step methodological process to formulate CBT sustainability indicators involved in-depth interviews, community workshops, working group meetings, focus group discussions (FGDs) and finally the practical implementation of the indicator system in Boga Lake.
The whole process was undertaken in four phases. In the initial phase, a day-long workshop was held in order to reach a general consensus among community members on objectives of using the sustainability indicator system. Also, the long-term vision of the CBT in Boga Lake and community perceptions and practices of sustainability were determined to identify specific key issues. Then, in the second phase, in-depth interviews with community members were undertaken to identify grass-roots level sustainability indicators through the lens of the local community. Preliminarily, a total of 110 indicators were identified by community participants and classified under fourteen key issues. Once the preliminarily selected set of candidate indicators was identified, a workshop was held to allow the local community to select the final set of measurable and manageable indicators. Respondents were also asked to determine the source of information for each indicator selected and the frequency of data collection, and also benchmarks to compare each indicator with over time. Finally, only 48 indicators were selected as manageable and measurable to track progresses, or otherwise, towards sustainability. A community research team of ten people were formed by the community members of Boga Lake who took the responsibility for operating the sustainability indicator system on a regular basis.
In the implementation phase, the community research team were able to practically implement the newly developed sustainability indicator system that required them to develop survey questionnaires and observation checklists, collect and analyse data, and write a report. The community research team developed two sets of questionnaires: one for community members and another for tourists. Also, ten sets of observation checklists and three sets of inventory checklists for trees, animals, and birds were developed to monitor and record changes in key issues related to CBT sustainability of Boga Lake. Finally, the community research team were able to prepare and disseminate sustainability reports leading to make action plans.
The local community of Boga Lake considered it as a matter of community pride to operate their own indicator system and believed that their research-based sustainability reports could serve as strong evidence to negotiate with local government authorities and other stakeholders, while also helping them to learn, adapt and make their own tourism-related decisions. Community members reported that, as each indicator was related to a very specific area of their CBT sustainability, this indicator approach enabled them to identify specific points to discuss in community meetings. In seminal frameworks for sustainability indicator development using a bottom-up research approach, researchers, not the local community, conduct the whole research from developing and operating the indicator system to report writing and formulating action plans, where local communities are involved as participants of research on their CBT projects. The contribution of this PhD study is to describe a methodological procedure to develop and transfer the ownership of a sustainability indicator system to the local community to operate the indictor system independently in order to assess their CBT sustainability.