Community participation in tourism development as a tool to foster sustainable land and resource use practices in a national park milieu

Community participation has been on the spotlight in tourism academia as a tool to induce sustainable tourism development. However, despite profound commendations of literature, destinations often fail to adequately operationalize effective community participation. Under the lenses of stakeholder theory and Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, the current study examines community participation in Dinsho area of Bale Mountains National Park, Southeastern Ethiopia. Arnstein’s citizen participation model is employed to better understand the extent of community participation in the tourism development process, while stakeholder theory is adopted to gain a deeper insight regarding the interests of stakeholders along with the corresponding management strategies. Research findings unfold that in Dinsho, the extant community participation corresponds to non-participation continuum where citizens are simply deceived by pseudo and tokenistic participation which led to inequitable benefit-sharing. Based on study findings, the researchers challenge that communities’ engagement in tourism development highly relies on gatekeepers’ nature and communities’ economic background and argue that in a venue where economically weak community and manipulative gatekeepers exist, ensuring community participation is more challenging. That, in turn, negatively affects the sustainable land and resource use practices leading to irreversible devastation on ecologically sensitive habitats such as the Bale Mountains National Park.