Tourism Month is observed every September in South Africa, and mostly revolves around highlighting and elevating tourism’s most “unique” and “distinct” products and services. In Africa, this often means its communities.

Communities have played a key role in the development and promotion of tourism, particularly in the global South. In these spaces, communities have showcased their indigenous knowledge and practices to international and domestic tourists alike. Since the emergence of community-based tourism (CBT) as a viable market segment more than half a century ago, particularly among communities located in rural and often marginalised grassroots settings, it has been both positively and negatively appraised.

CBT has been described as a type of tourism that takes social, cultural and environmental sustainability into account. Tourists are hosted by local communities, and once inside these “community bubbles”, visitors are meant to be offered a deeper participatory and interactive experience of the local way of life. CBT endeavours not only to raise awareness among tourists, but also to showcase the community’s “authentic” product/service offerings, with the hope of encouraging a repeat visit. Many argue for CBT to be impactful and profitable the community should not only be a key stakeholder in all activities, but should exercise some form of ownership, control and/or management over the initiative in the short and/or long term.

Since its inception in the late 1980s, CBT appeared to tick most boxes for a more just, equitable and transformative tourism sector, as it sought to move away from tourism’s exclusionist and elitist origins and legacies. It was perceived as a feature of the alternative development paradigm and experience-based economy. However, it has subsequently encountered various challenges, including inadequate travel infrastructure; lack of finances and participation; insufficient tourism, marketing and entrepreneurial skills; cultural commodification, appropriation and gentrification; and too few trained heritage and cultural tourism specialists.

Moreover, CBT has been increasingly interrogated as encouraging a “staged tourist gaze” – the 2012 documentary film Framing the Other, which follows the encounter between a Dutch tourist and a woman of the Mursi tribe -  illustrated the destructive impact that tourism can have on traditional communities. As a result of this erosion, several CBT projects have failed at the planning and implementation stages, and become “white elephants” not only for external investors, but also for the internal role players to fund, maintain and manage. This has often led to the premature and permanent end to these endeavours, which, once again, places the community very much outside the tourism value chain. This ultimately hurts the community, which generally pins its hopes and “survival” on CBT as a way to address its socio-economic problems.

Theoretically, CBT does have its advantages, such as localised decision-making, benefit-sharing, empowerment, conservation and preservation. Even so, such factors rarely manage to slow the downturn in tourism. Although there are several best-practice benchmarks in South Africa where CBT is serving as a profitable and inclusive enterprise, in most cases, communities have been placed on the margins of CBT projects. This scenario has raised questions within the industry and among academics: can communities truly be put back into CBT, where this form of tourism can function at an optimised, inclusive and profitable level over an extended period, or is it time to revisit the concept and operation of CBT?

UP’s Department of Historical and Heritage Studies has signed a memorandum of agreement with the national Department of Tourism’s, Tourism Research, Policy and International Relations branch to investigate these matters. Titled, Optimising Sustainable Community-Based Tourism: South African Scenarios and Solutions, this transdisciplinary research project seeks to address the gap in this sector by focusing on both communities involved in CBT and those that aren’t involved. It will determine whether communities, as ever-evolving entities, truly align with CBT or whether invested parties need to reconsider how communities can go about community-based development for the purposes of tourism.

Fundamentally, the research project seeks to address CBT within the context of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). In so doing, it will propose solutions to an unsustainable scenario that is in dire need of re-evaluation and revitalisation.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Pretoria.