Southern African Perspectives On Sustainable Tourism Management

This edited collection focuses on tourism development, sustainability and local change in southern Africa. The book offers a range of both conceptual and applied perspectives that address various changes in southern African tourism and community development relations. The key drivers of change that include climate change and globalization form the context for the diverse and interesting set of case studies from the region. The main conceptual grounds of the book cover sustainability, sustainable development goals (SDGs), responsibility, vulnerability, adaptation, resilience, governance, local development and inclusive growth. In this book sustainability is seen as one of the most important issues currently facing the tourism sector, affecting all types and scales of tourism operations and environments in the region. Tourism is an increasingly important economy in the southern African region and the industry is creating changes for communities and environment while also facing major challenges caused by global trends and changes. The book offers a case study driven approach to sustainability needs of tourism development in local community contexts. The case study chapters are linked through the book’s focus on sustainable tourism and local community development. Through emphasizing the need to understand both global change and local contexts in sustainable tourism development, this book is a valuable resource for all those working in the field.

This book addresses the application of sustainable HRM principles within tourism in the specific context of Africa, a neglected area of study. It draws on diverse aspects of HRM, from the micro- (individual) through the meso-level (organisational) to the macro-level (policy, governmental). It also reflects the diverse challenges facing a critical area within emerging African tourism, that of its workforce. The book is substantially research-based and provides a state-of-the-art picture of emergent studies in this area, drawing on case examples from a wide-range of African contexts. As such, it provides a comprehensive resource and starts discussion in an emergent research area.

The Handbook on Tourism and Conservation demonstrates the intrinsic nexus between tourism, the environment and sustainable natural resources use. It applies Ostrom’s social-ecological systems (SESs) theory as the analytical framework for reaching a consensus on divergent viewpoints within the context of global environmental change and emerging governance issues.

This book examines the connections between natural resources, tourism and community livelihood practices in Southern Africa, highlighting the successes and constraints experienced over the last 50 years. Questioning how natural resources, tourism and community livelihoods relations can positively contribute towards development efforts, this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understand socio-ecological systems that characterize the dynamics for sustainable development. It explores the history of conservation and natural resource management in Southern Africa and traces the development and growth of nature-based tourism. Boasting a wide range of tourism landscapes, including national parks, wetlands, forests and oceans, the book draws on case studies from a variety of Southern African countries, including Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and considers the political challenges for implementing policies and practices. Furthermore, it analyses broader issues such as the impact of climate change, human–wildlife co-existence and resulting conflicts, poor access to funding and poverty in local communities. The book argues that the links between conservation and livelihoods can be best understood by considering the different approaches to reconciling the demands of conservation and livelihoods that have evolved over the past decades. Containing contributions from natural and social sciences the book provides guidance for practitioners and policymakers to continue to shape policies and practices that are in line with the key tenets of sustainable development. It will also be of great interest to students and scholars researching Southern Africa, sustainable tourism and conservation.

The book represents the first accessible examination of the complex connections between tourism and sustainability in southern African context. The edited book introduces relationships between tourism, sustainability and development with a range of case studies from the region, focusing especially on natural resource dependent communities in processes of transition.

This book examines the nexus between conservation, land conflicts, and sustainable tourism approaches in Southern Africa, with a focus on equity, access, restitution, and redistribution. While Southern Africa is home to important biodiversity, pristine woodlands, and grasslands, and is a habitat for important wildlife species, it is also a land of contestations over its natural resources with a complex historical legacy and a wide variety of competing and conflicting issues surrounding race, cultural and traditional practices, and neoliberalism. Drawing on insights from conservation, environmental, and tourism experts, this volume presents the nexus between land conflicts and conservation in the region. The chapters reveal the hegemony of humans on land and associated resources including wildlife and minerals. By using social science approaches, the book unites environmental, scientific, social, and political issues, as it is imperative we understand the holistic nature of land conflicts in nature-based tourism. Discussing the management theories and approaches to community-based tourism in communities where there are or were land conflicts is critical to understanding the current state and future of tourism in African rural spaces. This volume determines the extent to which land reform impacts community-based tourism in Africa to develop resilient destination strategies and shares solutions to existing land conflicts to promote conservation and nature-based tourism. The book will be of great interest to students, academics, development experts, and policymakers in the field of conservation, tourism geography, sociology, development studies, land use, and environmental management and African studies.

Sustainable Tourism Policy and Planning in Africa offers an accessible and understandable overview of the challenges of integrating sustainability into tourism policy and planning in Sub-Saharan Africa and provides some interesting recommendations on how these could be overcome. Tourism is currently growing faster in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and in many other developing regions compared to the rest of the world. Using case examples from different segments of the tourism sector in different country contexts, this volume therefore reassesses context specific tourism policies and planning mechanisms in SSA over the years. It considers how the increasing focus on sustainability is reflected in different areas of the tourism sector including food security, the human capacity management, service delivery, local communities and heritage management, climate change and the influence of colonial legacies on tourism policy planning. For many SSA countries, it has only been in the last two decades that the development of sustainable and achievable context specific policies and planning mechanisms has become the norm. The chapters provide examples of how different dimensions of sustainability are integrated into tourism policy and practice, and examine the extent to which these are shaping the present, and their implications for the future sustainability of the tourism sector. Sustainable Tourism Policy and Planning in Africa will be of great value to academics, private and third sector employees to better understand tourism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Eight of the chapters were originally published as a special issue of Tourism Planning and Development. These are now complimented with a new introductory chapter and a concluding chapter that sets out a future research agenda for sustainable tourism policy and planning.