Defects of Tourism Revenue Sharing Policies and Practices in East Africa
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Date
2019
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal
Abstract
Sharing of tourism revenues with local communities has for long been regarded as a
key instrument in the arsenal for contemporary conservation. The approach is favored
for its ability to simultaneously deliver both conservation and rural development
moreover in mutually reinforcing ways. This paper reviews literature covering the
practice at Protected Areas (PAs) in East Africa and a number of critical inadequacies
are revealed. These include the marginal scale of benefits as observed in an evaluation
of a regional project where per capita investment averaged only $ 0.36 over a five year
period (2006-2010). Moreover, these revenues are frequently invested in public assets
(e.g. schools and roads) which communities have limited appreciation of on the
argument that these should be primary responsibilities of national and local
governments to whose coffers the communities contribute through taxation. Even when
individual households are targeted through household level projects, the sharing is
plagued by a variety of governance failures including elite capture, and distributive
inequity where for example the poor (the lower two to three quintiles) tend to be
excluded. Inequity also exists at community level where some local administrative
units are marginalized, and in other instances the revenues are used to reward loyalty
while also there is a significant leakage of revenues along the vertical distribution
chain of local government implementing the revenue sharing. Thus a lot remains to be
done if these schemes for sharing tourism revenues are to deliver as premised. There is
need to substantially increase the magnitude of the local share which then must be
secured by competent and legitimate, but closely supervised, local institutions to
ensure equitable distribution between and within local communities.
Description
Keywords
Tourism revenue, Benefit sharing, Ecotourism, Park outreach, East Africa
Citation
Tumusiime, D. M., & Byakagaba, P. (2019). Defects of Tourism Revenue Sharing Policies and Practices in East Africa. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal. DoI:10.14738/assrj.65.6278.