Summary

Tourism has become an important tool for development in rural, remote and peripheral regions in the last 50 years. However, in many places, tourism has failed to produce the promised benefits and often caused negative impacts due to a lack of local entrepreneurial capacity to benefit from tourism business opportunities, inadequate understanding of tourism markets and limited community awareness of tourism and its impacts. Drawing attention to the potential outcomes to communities when using tourism as a development strategy, this book provides a focused analysis of this emerging issue and seeks to provide positive guidance on improving the process of tourism planning and development. Chapters compile evidence and examples of how community capacity for tourism can be built and enhanced using case studies from Asia, Africa, South America, the South Pacific and rural Australia and the United States. Providing models and frameworks that can be applied to any developing area, this book will be useful to both academic researchers and government policy makers interested in tourism and rural development.