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Tourism in the Fond Gens Libre Indigenous community in Saint Lucia: Examining impacts and empowerment
... The conceptualisation of empowerment has been used in research that focuses on the issues of gender equality (Hashimoto, 2014: 223-225;Miettinen, 2007) and Indigenous issues (de Bernardi et al., 2018;Nicholas & Thapa, 2018), in the context of tourism development. It has been argued that external contacts, self-esteem, pride and confidence can have a positive influence on empowerment, whereas a lack of knowledge about tourism, a lack of self-confidence or a lack of skills might lead to disempowerment even though people are seemingly participating in tourism development (de Bernardi et al., 2018;Höckert, 2011). ...
The purpose of this chapter is to approach inclusion by discussing the roles of hosts and guests in participatory tourism projects. Instead of drawing inspiration from the predominant understanding of host–guest relations within hospitality management, we call attention to the more ‘ancient’ idea of hospitality, where – in its simplest form – hosts have the responsibility to take care of their guests’ well-being for a limited amount of time. Moreover, in the context of ‘project society’, we are not focused on host–guest relations that take place in different kinds of physical homes, but approach projects as metaphorical homes where different kinds of moments and relations of hospitality occur.
Decentralization has emerged as an important instrument of environmental and development policy in the last two decades. Presumed benefits of environmental policy decentralization depend in significant measure on broad participation in the programs that governments create to decentralize decision making related to resource management. This paper uses data from protected areas in Nepal’s Terai to examine who participates in environmental decentralization programs. On the basis of our statistical analysis, we highlight the fact that the likelihood of participation in community-level user groups is greater for those who are economically and socially better-off. We also find that individuals who have greater access to and who visit government offices related to decentralization policies more often are also more likely to participate in user groups created by state officials. Finally, we find a negative correlation between education and levels of participation. Our study and analysis support the argument that for decentralization policies to be successful on equity issues, it is important to build institutional mechanisms that encourage poorer and more marginal households to access government officials, improve access to educational opportunities, and create incentives to promote more interactions between less powerful rural residents and government officials.