Ecotourism as a Resource Sharing Strategy: Case Study of Community-Based Ecotourism at the Tangkahan Buffer Zone of Leuser National Park, Langkat District, North Sumatra, Indonesia

Wiratno Wiratno, Susanti Withaningsih, Budhi Gunawan and Johan Iskandar
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Wiratno Wiratno: Doctoral Programme on Environmental Studies, Graduate School, Universitas Padjadjaran, Bandung 40132, Indonesia
Susanti Withaningsih: Doctoral Programme on Environmental Studies, Graduate School, Universitas Padjadjaran, Bandung 40132, Indonesia
Budhi Gunawan: Doctoral Programme on Environmental Studies, Graduate School, Universitas Padjadjaran, Bandung 40132, Indonesia
Johan Iskandar: Doctoral Programme on Environmental Studies, Graduate School, Universitas Padjadjaran, Bandung 40132, Indonesia

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 6, 1-18

Abstract: The local community is an essential and key partner in managing protected areas, especially for national parks in Indonesia. Therefore, there is a need to establish adaptive collaborative management (ACM) between the park authorities and the local community. In 2000, several local leaders established a new organization to develop an ecotourism package called the Tangkahan Ecotourism Organization or Lembaga Pariwisata Tangkahan (LPT) and set up the Community Tour Operator to manage the ecotourism activities. Our study used a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis through focus group discussions (FGDs), interviews with related stakeholders and key informants, and carried out a literature review. It was found that ensuring local community could generate alternative income from ecotourism was an effective way to protect the park from any illegal activities. Additionally, the results about sustainability from the FGDs show that all three categories: Social Process, Adaptive Natural Resource Management, and Impact/Condition are interrelated, meaning that the collaboration and adaptive management in Tangkahan have resulted in high levels of humanistic well-being and the maintenance of ecological values, supporting collaboration processes and adaptive levels. Finally, our study can be used as a basis for a model of national parks focusing on ACM.

Keywords: adaptive collaborative management; collective awareness and collective action; community-based ecotourism; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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