Exploring tripartite praxis for the REDD + forest climate change initiative through community based ecotourism

Abstract

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) is a United Nations programme initiated in 2008 with the aim of mitigating climate change through the preservation of the world’s existing forest stocks. One of the challenges in its successful implementation has been community involvement in its design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The purpose of this study is to assess what REDD + can learn from the experience of Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET), which operates under many of the same conditions. A critical review of the related literature using the Scopus database was undertaken using three search strings including “REDD+” (2,913 listings), “community-based ecotourism” (113 listings) and “REDD + and tourism” (6 listings) to identify the variables and themes related to each. Despite the significant increase in the number of publications on REDD + since 2008, only one was specifically related to ecotourism. We argue that CBET understood as a form of social capital can function as an enabling platform for REDD+, in particular its implementation of international conservation policy by working with local communities/indigenous peoples and business stakeholders, referred to here as the “tripartite praxis”. We demonstrate how CBET can act as a basis from which to guide internationally driven incentive-based conservation policy and community entrepreneurship within a social capital framework.

Keywords:

• Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation
• climate change
• community-based ecotourism
• social capital
• local communities
• tripartite praxis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The REDD + programme is guided by the principals set down in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which seeks to respect the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples and members of local communities and aims to facilitate the full and effective participation of relevant stakeholders (MacFarquhar & Goodman, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Wearing

Dr. Stephen Wearing is an Conjoint Professor at the University of Newcastle (UoN) and Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. His research and projects are in the area of Leisure and Tourism Studies, with a PhD focused on sustainable forms of tourism. Stephen has made seminal contributions in many areas including ecotourism, volunteer tourism and community development, the importance of community based approaches in the leisure, recreation and tourism sector has formed the focus of his research. His practical experience as a town planner, environmental and park planner at local, state and international level have provided him with real world experiences that he brings to his teaching and research.

Matthew McDonald

Matthew McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in the Asia Graduate Centre, RMIT University, Vietnam. His research interests include the social psychology of work and leisure, political economy and consumer culture. To date Matthew has written four books, his latest including Critical Social Psychology: An Introduction (2^nd ed.) (with Brendan Gough and Marjella McFadden) and Social Psychology and Theories of Consumer Culture: A Political Economy Perspective (with Stephen Wearing).

Stephen Schweinsberg

Stephen Schweinsberg is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Management in the UTS Business School. His research interests relate to tourism knowledge formation and the impact of place based settings on destination development. Recent scholarship has been published in Annals of Tourism Research¸ the Journal of Sustainable Tourism and Tourism Management.

Paul Chatterton

Paul Chatterton is the founder and lead of WWF's Landscape Finance Lab, which incubates sustainable landscape solutions in the world's most biodiverse locations.  The Lab aims to harness the power of public and private financial instruments (blended finance) to initiate solutions at scale for sustainable landscapes and deforestation-free trade chains. During an extensive career with WWF, Paul has catalysed results including the first jurisdictional scale forest and climate (REDD+) programs on two continents, Europe's longest river protected area and the largest rainforest reserve in the Pacific.  Paul is a co-author of the Little Sustainable Landscape Book and co-initiator of Landmapp, a mobile app to provide affordable land tenure to rural communities.

Tahnee Bainbridge

Tahnee Bainbridge is a graduate from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and is an independent researcher and has been research assistant of a range of projects in the area of sustainability.