The Viability of Community-Based Tourism Initiatives in Rural Bonaire
Executive Summary
Having tourism to be interlaced into all parts of its society, Bonaire now suffers a sequence of events that threatens its ecological sustainability, carrying capacity, and future prosperity with solutions found only in interlocked complication. However, this can be disentangled by empowerment, capacity-building, and resource-based support for bottom-up tourism initiatives from the grassroots community, especially those located in rural Bonaire. This idea is better elaborated through the framework of community-based tourism, an alternative to mass tourism that is found to be detrimental to many. Thus, the research conducted for this report is an exploration on the enabling and the constraining factors affecting the viability of community-based tourism in rural Bonaire which is based on the established theory and practice of successful grassroots community tourism initiatives as points of reference. Utilizing qualitative approach, the data is collected from a fieldwork on Bonaire as well as a series of in-depth interviews conducted with purposive sampling. Drawing our findings together into a cohesive framework, we analyze how the different factors interact with each other before determining a series of recommendations on how to mitigate constraining factors, capitalize enabling factors, and empower the vision of the community.
