Facilitating collaboration and community participation in tourism development: The case of South-Eastern Nigeria

Abstract

Collaboration and community participation are crucial for securing sustainable tourism and highlight the need to listen and respond to the broad range of stakeholders’ voices, opinions, and concerns. These concepts dominated the discourse of sustainable-responsible tourism and gave rise to collaboration theory as well as various types of community participation. Many scholars in both Western and emerging economies have employed these concepts; however, there is limited research on how they apply in the Nigerian tourism industry. Therefore, this exploratory research discusses collaboration and community participation in tourism development in Nigeria, using the Southeastern region as a case study. In this area, tourism is in the early phase of growth. The paper reports on interviews and focus group discussions used to interact with tourism stakeholders in the region (traditional rulers, men, women, and youth representatives, chief priests, security agents, and tourism officials). Results showed that while the stakeholders are willing to collaborate, challenges affecting their efforts include autocratic governance structures leading to mistrust, clash of responsibilities, inadequate funding for security, lack of tourism awareness and little respect for local culture. The paper concludes that to develop a resident-friendly tourism destination and sustain collaboration and community participation, stakeholders require education about tourism and opportunities to participate in planning.

Glocalizing tourism in Southeastern Nigeria: residents’ perspectives

“…Our assertion is consistent with the views of Brida et al (2014) about tourism having positive socio-cultural impacts on local culture. Similarly, Eyisi et al (2021a) found that the Igbo people identified respect for their culture as one of the strategies for gaining their support and participation in tourism. To glocalize tourism in the region, developers and planners need to understand that the world operates in a two-way exchange of ideas between global and local forces (Soulard and McGehee, 2017).…”

“…Such empowerment is a way of glocalizing tourism. Elsewhere, Eyisi et al (2021a) found that among other benefits expected by residents in Southeastern Nigeria from tourism, they demanded to boost security and revive their culture because of the insecurity and religious challenges in the region. The implication is that these residents would likely support the type of tourism that addresses these issues and antagonize tourism if it worsens the situation.…”

The Best Practices of Youth in Responsible Tourism: Insights from Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam

“…They are also critical in successful tourism development, such that destination managers and other authorities in the tourism industry must consider youths' voice in tourism planning. The involvement of youths is indeed crucial to implementing responsible tourism, as their attitude may directly affect the development of the tourism sector (Eyisi et al, 2020). However, they are often excluded from the decision-making process (Seraphin et al, 2020) and lack the support to fully utilise their potential.…”

Tourism as an engine for sustainable development in the Euroregion. Insights from the Tatra Euroregion

“…Some literature reviews (Calero and Turner, 2020) have discovered that research in the field of regional economy and tourism as a factor of regional economic development is insufficient, which mostly deals with regional economic development and tourism, using descriptive analysis. According to Rahman and Salahudin (2021), the main topics examined in relation to tourism and regional development nowadays are sustainable development (Candia et al, 2020;Eyisi et al, 2020;Hengky and Kikvidze, 2020;Saneinia et al, 2020;Ivars-Baidal et al, 2021;Tanaka et al, 2021), innovation (Kalvet et al, 2020;Ratnasari et al, 2020;Syapsan and Diartho, 2020;Casanova Enault et al, 2021) local governments (Brillo, 2020;Caaman ó-Francó and Sua rez, 2020;Nel and Connelly, 2020;Prathama et al, 2020;Almeida and Silveira, 2021) and the local communities, residents (Anandhyta and Kinseng, 2020;Hui et al, 2020;Nguyen et al, 2020). Although there are numerous empirical research papers that have attempted to measure the effects of various factors influencing tourism development and regional development in general, very few of them have followed a formal theoretical framework.…”