Introduction and main hypothesis
For many years, tourism was considered a magic formula for promoting regional development and reducing poverty in developing countries (Ashley et al 2000; Harrison 2001; Mowforth and Munt 2003; UNWTO 2007; Telfer and Sharpley 2008). This applies in particular to the glaciated highlands of East Africa, which—in top-down processes—were all declared national parks over the past decades. The state national park authorities of Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda attach extraordinary economic importance to Afro-alpine tourism in the scenically very attractive highest mountains of Africa: Kilimanjaro (5895 m), Mt Kenya (5199 m), and Rwenzori (5109 m)
(see http://www.kws.org, http://www.tanzaniaparks.com, and http://www.uwa.or.ug). In contrast, the present contribution and numerous other studies (eg Sinclair 1998; Hall 2007; Zhao and Richie 2007; Saarinen et al 2009, 2011; Van Der Duim et al 2012) take a critical and differentiated approach. Analyses of the effects of alpine tourism on nature reserves in tropical countries (eg Vorlaufer 1995; Banskota and Sharma 1998; Mu ¨ ller-Bo ¨ ker 2000) as well as specialized studies of Afroalpine tourism in Kenya and Uganda (Osmaston et al
1998; Erhard 2000; Erhard and Steinicke 2006; Steinicke 2011; Steinicke and Neuburger 2012) typically show that, at best, high-mountain tourism benefits state organizations and big tour operators, whose headquarters are usually located in the respective capital. In comparison, the development impulses received by the destinations visited are insignificant: Both in the Mt
Kenya region (Erhard 2000) and in the Rwenzori Mountains (Craddock Williams 1998; Steinicke 2011), alpine tourism offers only marginal and insecure monetary income. Despite this rather unfavorable balance, which is also observed in other tourist regions of the global South (Harrison 2001), in many areas the local population has tried to increase benefits to the
community in organized fashion by distributing income from tourism directly to the families, avoiding external absorption of profits. This idea, termed ‘‘communitybased tourism,’’ has been adopted in development collaboration in recent years and has been used as a regional development strategy (Scheyvens 2002; Blackstock 2005; Okazaki 2008).
From the less than voluminous state of research on community-based tourism in the high mountains of tropical Africa, as well as observations based on it, the following main hypothesis can be deduced for the Mt Kenya region: Existing Afro-alpine tourism can neither promote poverty mitigation nor resolve regional disparities. However, strategies of community-based tourism stabilize the livelihoods of rural households, even though they are inadequate measures for advancing regional development.
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