Positive Tourism In Africa

Positive Tourism in Africa provides a crucial counter-narrative to the prevailing colonial and reductionist perspective on Africa’s tourism trajectory and future. It offers a uniquely optimistic outlook for tourism in Africa whilst acknowledging the many challenges that African countries continue to grapple with. By examining broad and localized empirical studies, conceptual frameworks, culturally centered paradigms, and innovative methodological approaches for African contexts, this book showcases the many facets of tourism in Africa that illustrate hope, resilience, growth, and survival. This volume explores themes such as community-based tourism, wildlife tourism, tourism governance and leadership, crisis recovery, regional integration, the role of indigenous knowledge, event tourism and the impact of smart technologies. It acknowledges the challenges and opportunities for growth that exist in these various contexts and explores how tourism creates value for the spectrum of its participants. Including a wide selection of contributions from diverse authors, many of them African, this book offers an Afro-centric interpretation of tourism phenomena. It will be of great interest to students, researchers and academics in the field of Tourism and African Studies, as well as Development Studies and Geography.

Positive Tourism in Africa provides a crucial counter-narrative to the prevailing colonial and reductionist perspective on Africa’s tourism trajectory and future. It offers a uniquely optimistic outlook for tourism in Africa whilst acknowledging the many challenges that African countries continue to grapple with. By examining broad and localized empirical studies, conceptual frameworks, culturally centered paradigms, and innovative methodological approaches for African contexts, this book showcases the many facets of tourism in Africa that illustrate hope, resilience, growth, and survival. This volume explores themes such as community-based tourism, wildlife tourism, tourism governance and leadership, crisis recovery, regional integration, the role of indigenous knowledge, event tourism and the impact of smart technologies. It acknowledges the challenges and opportunities for growth that exist in these various contexts and explores how tourism creates value for the spectrum of its participants. Including a wide selection of contributions from diverse authors, many of them African, this book offers an Afro-centric interpretation of tourism phenomena. It will be of great interest to students, researchers and academics in the field of Tourism and African Studies, as well as Development Studies and Geography.

This book provides a comprehensive and readable overview of the critical debates and controversies around tourism in Africa, and the major factors that are affecting tourism development now and in the future. Drawing upon research emerging from collaborations between a growing number of African academics and practitioners based in the continent and in the African diaspora as well as international colleagues, the Handbook offers key critical insights into the issues, challenges and trends that Africa and African tourism is facing. Part I covers continent-wide issues such as climate change, ICT, heritage and development. The remaining parts are organised along geographic lines, with each chapter covering the development of tourism, current trends and discussion of critical issues such as community participation, gender, backpacking, urban tourism, wildlife tourism and conservation. Combining an overview of key theories, concepts, contemporary issues and debates, this book will be a valuable resource for students, academics and practitioners investigating the role of tourism in Africa.

Focusing on the future of tourism, Sustainable Tourism Dialogues in Africa is inclusive of experienced and emerging researchers, as well as incorporating local stakeholders in the tourism industry: architects, tourism operators, sustainable tourism lobbyists, policy makers, archaeologists, and geographers. The editors are frontline sustainable tourism advocates in Africa, and the book’s thematic content is derived from 30 inter-university seminars on sustainable tourism hosted by Sustainable Travel & Tourism Agenda Kenya from 2017 to November 2019. These seminars involved the participation of 17 universities in Kenya, tourism operators, conservationists, developmentalists, investors, policy makers, and students. Every chapter is a voice projecting aspirations for the responsible management of tourism in Africa and promoting the ideals of sustainable tourism that young people in Africa advocate for the industry’s future. In so doing, the authors pinpoint the necessary actions for bringing about transformations in sustainable development of tourism. The book thus seeks to encourage debate, while facilitating the development of both theoretical and practical foundations for managing tourism sustainably in Africa.

This book provides a management perspective on the full historical, contemporary, and geographic landscape of hospitality and tourism (H&T) in Africa. In so doing, it critically assesses and challenges the applicability of Western theories within the African context and draws attention to the insights offered by African management concepts. A variety of key topics are examined, including, for example, H&T management practices and management innovation in Africa, the drivers of and variation in uptake of Western management practices, policies and strategies to promote the development of H&T organizations, the influence of management practices on the competitiveness of African countries as tourism destinations, and areas for improvement of H&T organizations in Africa in the digital age. The approach is multidisciplinary. Both local and global perspectives are presented by authors from Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia, with inclusion of intra- and inter-country comparisons. This book will be essential reading for scholars, students, businesses, and policy makers with an interest in H&T in Africa.

Since its first mention in the academic literature, ecotourism has been endorsed by NGOs and governments as the most environmentally sound and locally beneficial method of tourist development. Over the last thirty years sub-Saharan Africa has adopted ecotourism as the primary focus for tourism development; research into this has demonstrated mixed results. In this publication, we seek to explore the actual outcomes for African countries that have developed their tourism policy around the principals and values of ecotourism. The sheer scope and magnitude of the task means that a complete evaluation of ecotourism in Africa is impossible. Instead, included here are spot assessments of various aspects of ecotourism related to conservation, policy development, environment, governance, community and indigenous peoples in southern Africa. The studies cover a wide array of countries, including Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Though this is only the beginning of a needed long term evaluation of the positives and negatives of ecotourism, it provides a starting point from which to move forward. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ecotourism.