Ecotourism benefits and livelihood improvement for sustainable development in the nature conservation areas of Bhutan

Abstract

This paper describes the socio-economic characteristics of three rural communities living inside or close to protected areas in Bhutan and examines possible ways to improve their living standards through ecotourism for sustainable development. Face-to-face interviews, supported by structured questionnaires, were conducted to determine 1) sources of livelihood; 2) the impact of tourism; and 3) the readiness of rural communities to participate in income-generating activities. Farmers were keen to take up ecotourism and wanted to use the proceeds to increase their livestock herds. However, this would increase pressure on natural resources, causing land degradation. Additionally, income from ecotourism may also lead, in the long run, to social inequality in remote communities. To prevent environmental stress in protected areas, social inequity and potential land degradation, newly generated wealth from ecotourism needs to be appropriately invested by the stakeholders.In this paper, recognizing ecotourism as a niche market with its unique feature and potential to balance economic development of rural communities with nature conservation, we explore the livelihoods of three rural farming communities in two protected areas and in one valley nearby -to fi nd out whether ecotourism could supplement the subsistence agricultural economy of the rural population to improve their living standard. We examine people's livelihoods and incomes, the communities' interest in ecotourism development and anticipated ways of spending the new wealth from ecotourism. In addition, we look at the impact of trekking tourism on rural livelihoods, people's expectations from ecotourism and farmers' perception of trends in natural resources. Because tourism development in Bhutan has been carefully guided and ecotourism is relatively new -considering that trekking tourism is not necessarily analogous to ecotourism -our approach in this case study is exploratory.Brunet et al. (2001) and Rinzin et al. (2007b) discuss that the Bhutanese approach to tourism development has been cautious because of the country's desire to balance the economic benefi ts of tourism with ecological integrity and cultural cont inuity. The approach might have been infl uenced by the theory of the Himalayan environmental degradation, which is strongly challenged by Ives and Messerli (1989). The emergence of this theory, which postulates that loss of forest cover in the Himalayas has contributed to fl oods in northern India, coincided with mass tourist activities of the 1970s and 1980s in the Nepalese Himalayas. Forest degradation in the region was partly explained by unregulated tourism (Bhatt, 2006), which also risked erosion of local traditional values with the arrival of the 'tourist-hippie' culture. That culture was short lived, and the community-based resource management approach to reconciling development and conservation has since helped ease concerns over forest degradation, especially in the Annapurna conservation areas of Nepal (Bajracharya et al., 2005). Moreover...

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