What is it about?
This work is a contribution to understand the advantages and disadvantages of promoting ecotourism in Mayan rainforests and how ecotourism stakeholders may empower local communities to engage in ecotourism as an alternative livelihood to protect the environment on which they depend. To do so, social research methods were conducted to gain information about the level of participation in ecotourism from community members based on a set of indicators of empowerment and disempowerment.
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Why is it important?
Assessing indicators based on data collected from social research methods is not rare in the literature. However, converting this information into numeric values to graphically show community empowerment in a given community was an add-on to the present research. The numeric values are the result of a three-staged methodology that first identified a set of indicators from the literature, then conducted interviews and focus groups with stakeholders, and then built a chart based on 60 indicators.
Perspectives
Almost four years after being published, I can say I feel happy about this paper as it has been a useful tool for assessing ecotourism viability with projects from local communities. For instance, the University of Yucatan in Mexico has used this publication to assess the level of empowerment in other Maya settings of the region. As a scientific research, it is doing well too. It has been cited at least 10 times and downloaded already by a number of people. However, it lacked a good marketing strategy in social media. This is something I want to take into account from now on.
Adrian Mendoza Ramos
James Cook University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Indigenous ecotourism in the Mayan rainforest of Palenque: empowerment issues in sustainable development, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, September 2013, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2013.828730.
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