Accessing the Impenetrable: The Nature and Distribution of Tourism Benefits at a Ugandan National Park

Abstract

Nature-based tourism is widely considered a conservation strategy because it can provide benefits for local people and thereby increase support for conservation and contribute to development. However, concerns have been raised over the uneven distribution of benefits. Here we use access analysis to investigate the distribution of tourism benefits at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, and the underlying factors constraining access to benefits. We introduce two new categories of engagement in tourism: active (for example through employment) and passive (for example through revenue sharing). Benefits from active engagement were often monetary, and access to them was often tightly constrained. In contrast, benefits from passive engagement were often nonmonetary and were more widely accessible. By analyzing together multiple active and passive pathways to tourism engagement, the study reveals that tourism benefits in some form can reach a wide range of local people, even where access to individual pathways is tightly constrained.

Keywords:

• access analysis
• Bwindi Impenetrable National Park
• conservation
• development
• distribution
• mountain gorillas
• nature-based tourism
• Uganda

Notes

^a Figures in parentheses represent the number of women in each category.

^a Figures in parentheses represent the number of women in each category.

Note. LL = log-likelihood; AIC = difference in Akaike information criterion between the model in question and the model with the lowest AIC; %DE = percent deviance explained. For gender, males were coded as 1 and females as 2. Positive parameter estimates therefore mean it was more likely for males to be engaged in tourism, and vice versa. For wealth, the richest wealth rank was coded as 1, the middle rank 2, and the poorest rank 3. Positive parameter estimates therefore mean it was more likely for individuals from poorer households to be engaged in tourism, and vice versa. The null model with all variables is shown under (c) for comparison.

We prefer the term “nature-based tourism,” taken simply to mean tourism based on natural attractions, to the term “ecotourism,” which implies particular positive environmental and social impacts and is subject to multiple conflicting definitions (Orams 1995).

We recognize that in some cases individuals may take active steps to strengthen their capacity to gain access to the benefits of passive engagement (for example, to secure recognition as a “community” member).

Tourism can also bring indirect benefits at the destination through supply chain linkages or respending of tourism revenue in the local economy.

We recognize the delay since data collection. However, continued fieldwork (to 2009) suggests that the broad pattern of benefits in the field area is unchanged.

The latter criterion was included because the baseline survey results showed that over half the population was under 16 years of age, and very few of these young people were engaged in tourism. We therefore decided to exclude children, for whom engagement in tourism was rarely a possibility, as including them would potentially swamp any effect of age on engagement among older people who had left school.

To ensure that pooling created ranks that were equivalent between villages, two quantified measures of wealth (total number of livestock and material assets owned) were collected for each household and used as the response variable in analysis of variance tests, modeled against village, wealth rank, and the interaction between the two. Results for both response variables showed significant differences between villages and wealth ranks, but no interaction, demonstrating that the allocation of households to each rank was consistent across villages.

This approach to finding the best model is considered superior to stepwise improvement of models by removal of nonsignificant factors until all remaining factors are significant (Burnham and Anderson 2002).