An approach to tourism development that emphasises the need for community participation in tourism planning is advocated as a pathway to sustainable tourism and poverty alleviation. However, it is argued that the community participation concept originated in the developed world and faces different and context-specific limitations when applied in developing countries. This paper examines the implementation of local community participation in planning associated with ecotourism in protected areas in Malawi. The views of villagers, along with other key stakeholders, including ecotourism operators, protected area management agencies, government departments and non-governmental organisations were investigated through a qualitative study undertaken around the two case-study sites of Liwonde National Park and Majete Wildlife Reserve. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, and was thematically analysed. The findings reveal significant limiting factors affecting community participation in ecotourism planning in Malawi, including: apathy; inadequate financial resources; inadequate information; low education levels; unfair distribution of benefits; lack of trained human resources; a centralised public administration; lack of coordination; and human–wildlife conflicts. The findings indicate the need for both greater advocacy of community participation, and the need to incorporate specific strategies which can facilitate community participation that are tailored to developing country contexts.

Protected area-based tourism is being used both as a local development and conservation tool in many countries. It has been argued that the benefits local communities receive from protected area-based tourism and support for conservation can be enhanced when local people are actively involved in the tourism planning and protected area management activities. But most studies ignore or rarely articulate the actions required to promote effective community participation in tourism planning. Most participatory tourism development processes have also remained unassessed in terms of ascertaining their effectiveness. It is therefore appropriate for tourism planners to find means of effectively involving local communities in protected area-based tourism planning. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework for effective participation of local communities in tourism planning associated with protected areas. The framework incorporates perspectives and experiences from public participation in both broader tourism planning and general development planning. It has been developed to be used as a tool for effective community participation in tourism planning and any related assessments of the planning process.

There are increasingly strident calls from many sectors of society for the tourism industry, the world’s largest industry, to adopt a more ethical approach to the way it does business. In particular there has been an emphasis placed on the need for a more ethical approach to the way the tourism industry interacts with consumers, the environment, with indigenous peoples, those in poverty, and those in destinations suffering human rights abuses. This book introduces students to the important topic of tourism ethics and illustrates how ethical principles and theory can be applied to address contemporary tourism industry issues. A critical role of the book is to highlight the ethical challenges in the tourism industry and to situate tourism ethics within wider contemporary discussions of ethics in general. Integrating theory and practice the book analyses a broad range of topical and relevant tourism ethical issues from the urgent ‘big-picture’ problems facing the industry as a whole (e.g. air travel and global warming) to more micro-scale everyday issues that may face individual tourism operators, or indeed, individual tourists. The book applies relevant ethical frameworks to each issue, addressing a range of ethical approaches to provide the reader with a firm grounding of applied ethics, from first principles. International case studies with reflective questions at the end are integrated throughout to provide readers with valuable insight into real world ethical dilemmas, encouraging critical analysis of tourism ethical issues as well as ethically determined decisions. Discussion questions and annotated further reading are included to aid further understanding. The Ethics of Tourism: Critical and Applied Perspectives is essential reading for all Tourism students globally.

This article shares and extends research-based developments at the University of Otago, New Zealand, that seek to explore how students’ worldviews change as they experience higher education with us. We emphasise that sustainability attributes may be described in terms of knowledge, skills and competencies but that these are underpinned by affective attributes such as values, attitudes and dispositions; so that ‘education for sustainable development’ is substantially a quest for affective change. We describe approaches to categorise affective outcomes and conclude that ‘education for sustainable development’ objectives comprise higher order affective outcomes (leading to behavioural change) that are challenging for higher education to address. Our own work emphasises the need for student anonymity as these higher order outcomes are assessed, evaluated, monitored, researched or otherwise measured using research instruments that focus on worldview. A longitudinal mixed-effects repeat-measures statistical model is described that enables higher education institutions to answer the question of whether or not ‘education for sustainable development’ objectives are being achieved. Discussion links affect to critical reasoning and addresses the possibility of documenting and assessing the development of lower and mid-order affective outcomes. We conclude that ‘education for sustainable development’ objectives need to be clearly articulated if higher education is to be able to assess, or evaluate, their achievement.

Most studies on community participation in tourism planning only advocate the importance of the concept and/or identify barriers without articulating the required actions or strategies to actually promote community participation. Based on a study in two protected areas in Malawi, this paper identifies and discusses possible strategies that can enhance community participation in tourism planning associated with protected areas in developing countries. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. The study participants were from protected area management agencies, government departments, non-governmental organisations, tourism operators and the local population surrounding the two protected areas. The findings suggest the need for a rethink on how local communities around protected areas are involved in tourism planning in developing country contexts. Six strategies emerged as major prerequisites to achieve full and active community participation: public awareness and education; capacity building; creation of linkages; use of appropriate participation methods; involvement of appropriate local community organisations and decentralisation and coordination of relevant management organisations.

Outdoor nature-based recreation practices provide a window on human/non-human relationships in New Zealand society and for some new immigrants these relationships metaphorically parallel their settlement experiences. This paper draws on the qualitative component of a mixed method study conducted in New Zealand, which focused on participation in outdoor nature-based recreation in national and regional parks. Recent immigrants in New Zealand bring with them environmental values and expectations of what recreational participation in outdoor nature-based settings should and might entail. Recent migrant perceptions of these natural habitats throw into relief assumed givens about the role of national parks and the social and cultural function that these institutions have fulfilled since their inception in New Zealand society. Our research demonstrates that being able to locate one’s self in nature-based settings is central to migrant integration, yet for a significant group of immigrants this is not always possible in New Zealand. This research raises a number of important questions about the nature of leisure and the politics of the environment in New Zealand. In multicultural New Zealand outdoor nature-based recreation, those who participate and those who do not, what they see and what it means to them provides a window on contemporary societal, environmental and cultural politics.