The workshop
On Friday 11th of November 2016, Ms. Potjana Suansri and Mr. Peter Richards from the Thai Community Based Tourism Institute (CBTI) provided 2 interactive workshops at the NHTV about community involvement and empowerment in tourism development.
Potjana and Peter have many years of experience in Community Based Tourism development and have worked on multiple tourism projects in Southeast Asia. During this workshop, the subject was a community based tourism development project in Kyah state in Myanmar. The latter was especially interesting, as at the moment of the workshop I had to make a tourism development plan for the country Myanmar for module 2 of the Master Tourism Destination Management, together with two classmates. In this project, community involvement was also a hot topic as Myanmar just recently opened up to tourism and communities in this country arenāt aware yet about the proās and conās of tourism, nor are they empowered to be fully involved with decisions regarding tourism (read more here).
Therefore, our interest in learning more about Community Based Tourism was a fact. However, regardless of the project for module 2, I was always eager to learn more about how communities can be involved in developing countries and this was a perfect moment to learn from the professionals of the field, instead of reading it in textbooks.
The workshop started with an introduction and Ms. Suansri and Mr. Richards enlightened us about who they are and about the company they are working for. Furthermore, detailed information was given about Community Based Development in general. We were free to ask as many questions as we wanted and this made the workshop really interactive, as promised. Ms. Suansri and Mr. Richards tried to answer all of the questions as well as they could and after almost two hours, everyone had a good idea about what community based tourism is about. The following paragraph will indicate my most memorable lessons.
What have I learned? For me personally, new and interesting findings were for instance the fact that prior to carrying out a community based development project in a township e.g., first a consultation takes place with the residents. This way, the residents can choose whether to participate in the project or not. The ones who indicate that they want to participate will get workshops and trainings, in order to find out their capabilities and the possibilities. I believe this is a fair and logical way to start of a project like this, which could change people's lives and livelihoods. However, of course it can always happen that a member of the community does not want to get involved in the beginning, but changes his mind later on after he sees his neighbours benefiting. This will always be a tricky situation, but as Potjana and Peter told, once they educated a few people about tourism and the ways to positively benefit from this as a community, these people then can teach others and share their gained knowledge with other communities. This way, as many communities as possible will get the chance to participate and benefit from tourism. Another lesson I have learned through this workshop is, as Peter explained, it doesn't necessarily mean that attracting lesser tourists to a village means less negative impacts compared to 'big groups' of tourists, as long as it doesn't exceed the carrying capacity. It can even be the case that 100 tourists leave a smaller footprint than 10, if those 10 tourists are not the target group and don't behave properly. Namely, Community Based Tourism is all about preparing the villagers to welcome tourists that are interested in the products and experience they can offer. Therefore it is highly important there is a fitting match between what the community can deliver and what the tourists want to experience, but also how they behave in the village.
All in all it was a very interesting and valuable workshop and I believe the main lesson I have learned about community based tourism is that it's a "match" between both the community and the tourists. Both parties will have to contribute in order to make the concept of CBT succeed. And if it is done right, both communities in developing countries and tourists can learn a lot and benefit positively from this form of tourism. These findings were also translated into our development plan for Myanmar for module 2. To find out more about how this project and how the workshop contributed to our development plan for Myanmar in particular, stay foot for my next blog!
The group of students with Ms. Potjana Suansri and Mr. Peter Richards
