Community-based Tourism as Strategic Dead-end

David Weaver

This is in response to Jim Butcher who rightly points out how community-based tourism (CBT) has maintained its status as orthodoxy in some academic and non-profit quarters despite its numerous flaws and contradictions which, as also correctly noted, have not received the recognition or attention from tourism scholars that they deserve. This blindness suggests that proponents are still locked into the ideologies and assumptions that framed its introduction in the early 1980s as the sine qua non of alternative tourism. Corporate mass tourism, as is well known, was regarded by many academics of the left as inherently evil, and locally controlled small-scale tourism served as a diametrically opposed and morally correct counterpoint (Dernoi 1981). Although long discredited as simplistic and naïve (see for example Butler 1990), this dogma unfortunately is still reflected and advocated in most of the CBT discourses that have proliferated in subsequent years.

Keywords: research probe; community participation;.