The legacy of war for community-based tourism development: learnings from Cambodia

Abstract

This paper investigates how resident perceptions affect the successful implementation of community-based tourism (CBT) in a least developed country (LDC) scenario. By realizing how past and present experiences of war affect resident perceptions, including how they view themselves, their community and tourism, we can build an understanding of how to assess the capacity for a community to successfully embrace and sustain CBT for development. This will be achieved by exploring two cases of CBT in Cambodia: the Banteay Chmmar subdistrict and Banlung town. These two cases represent a successful and unsuccessful implementation of CBT in Cambodia as an LDC utilizing tourism for development. Learnings from this situation can be applied to other post-war tourism and development destinations.