Community Corporate Joint Ventures: An Alternative Model for Pro-Poor Tourism Development

Abstract

Particularly in light of the 2000 United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), governments, multilateral aid agencies, non-government organizations (NGOs) and local communities are increasingly “harnessing” tourism for poverty alleviation in lesser development countries (LDCs). In the case of the Yucatan Peninsula, rural Maya communities have had little opportunity for participation in the tourism industry beyond low wage labour in the Mexican Caribbean tourist poles. Yet, tourist demand for “authentic” experiences is strong enough to suggest that community-based rural tourism among the Maya could potentially achieve the pro-poor tourism (PPT) objective of channelling tourism earnings to low-wealth villages. The purpose of this article is to present a conceptual framework for a community corporate joint venture to achieve this PPT objective. In this article we discuss the conventional model for tourism development and present an alternative model for community-based rural tourism enterprises. This model, created from a broader rural development program that was successfully pilot tested by the authors, is applied in the case of collectively owned Mexican ejido lands in the Yucatan Peninsula but also has applicability for alternative tourism ventures in other collective land tenure contexts.