beatriceblake

media type="custom" key="3478158" align="right"Conversation with Beatrice Blake
related: conversations facebook: [|CONSERVacations] twitter: [|keytocostarica] youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/keytocostarica#p/u

//Beatrice Blake - [] - is the veteran guidebook author of New Key to Costa Rica and has kindly agreed to participate in an online Q&A.//

**Ron Mader**: Starting this conversation ... Beatrice, in the world of ecotourism and responsible travel, what issues are you paying attention this year? What gets your goat? What's gives you hope?


 * Beatrice Blake**: Thanks for asking! Since I have been excited by the development of community-owned ecotourism businesses in Costa Rica over the last decade, and feature them at http://keytocostarica.com, I started seeing overdevelopment as a community issue too. It's a sign that the people of a community do not have a say in what goes on there--to the point where the community's water supply can be threatened. This has been the subject of several lawsuits in the northern Guanacaste beaches.

It also deeply saddens me that drug money seems to call the shots in Central America and Mexico these days, causing so much death and destruction at the same time as the hotels and shopping malls rise. I don't think the problem will end until the US admits its hunger for drugs and for the profits that they bring. There is something so backward about the whole thing.

On a happier note, for most of the travelers who visit ACTUAR's community-owned ecotourism destinations, the experience is the highlight of their trip, offering them real interactions with Costa Rican people who are creating healthy communities by conserving their forests and rivers, and attracting tourism in a responsible way.

**Ron Mader**: Again, thank you for participating in this conversation, Beatrice. I've enjoyed your New Key book since the [|8th edition]. I'd like to focus on ACTUAR - can you tell us more about what this organization does and how you collaborate with them?


 * Beatrice Blake**: ACTUAR, the Costa Rican Rural Tourism Association, was created in 2001 by community organizations in many parts of Costa Rica that have their own community-owned ecolodges, forest reserves and adventure attractions. The Association wisely decided to form its own travel agency, to be an interface between the farming communities and the tourists that want to visit. Now, ACTUAR Rural Adventures has evolved into a full service travel agency that is a model of sustainable tourism development. It has won five leaves on the Certification of Sustainable Tourism, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute's well-respected rating system. ACTUAR helps local residents to be entrepreneurs on their own land rather than being pressured to sell it. People who previously would have only been gardeners or maids in an ecolodge now are the owners of their own tourism destinations, providing visitors with memorable experiences of nature and local culture. ACTUAR members are often conservation activists, so they have many interesting stories to share, and are a source of inspiration for visitors.

On ACTUAR tours, you get to know the cultural diversity of Costa Rica, experiencing indigenous, Afro-Caribbean and //campesino// cultures. You can travel by dugout cano media type="custom" key="3478206" align="right" e to the indigenous community of Yorkin, and learn how they process the fruit of their sacred tree, the cacao, to make chocolate. You can walk on a suspended bridge near a 175-foot waterfall at Los Campesinos Reserve, and swim in pristine waterfall pools. Or hike to a hidden valley at Cerro Escondido Lodge on the Nicoya Peninsula. You can take a 3-day hike into the ancient oak forests of La Amistad International Park to see the unforgettable Resplendent Quetzal. You can sit on the verandah of El Copal Reserve and be overwhelmed by the constant parade of brightly colored tanagers and hummingbirds. If so inclined, travelers can participate in farming activities, conservation programs, and other aspects of rural life, or cultural events like the Fiesta del Toro y la Mula inTérraba. ACTUAR promotes decentralized tourism, encouraging direct contact with nature in less-visited areas in order to reduce the impact on over-exploited parks, reserves and tourist destinations. ACTUAR member organizations preserve over 25.000 acres of forest, thus creating biological corridors throughout the country.

ACTUAR rescued me from a meaningless life as a travel writer, and showed me that there is another way of doing tourism: where tourism preserves local culture rather than destroying it, where tourism is used to help farmers supplement their income so that they can stay on the land, and where visitors feel that they have had a truly unique and memorable experience of getting to know the people of small rural communities so that their vacation is making a difference in their lives and in the lives of those they visit.

Since 2005, I have been helping travelers learn about community tourism so that they can include it in their itineraries. Through ACTUAR's travel agency, we set people up with excellent bilingual naturalist guide/drivers who know their stuff, are people pleasers, and make the experience of getting to these isolated rural communities enjoyable, intimate, and hassle-free. I love it when I hear how our guides can connect with grandparents, little kids, and teenagers, and how our travelers feel that they have made new friends, and come to a new understanding of how rural communities can develop through tourism and conservation.

Ron Mader: Recently Harold Goodwin announced the depressing news -- [] -- that in a survey of community-based tourism initiatives, only a few have been successful. In your view, is ACTUAR an example of community-based tourism? Also, how is it faring in economic and cultural terms?

Beatrice Blake: I agree with Harold Goodwin's study that "The two most significant criteria {to define Community Based Tourism} are community ownership/management and community benefit".

Social capital and empowerment are also important. I consider them both results of the success of CBT, and part of the PROCESS of developing a new model of tourism "development" that includes the residents of pristine natural areas in determining how tourism can meet their needs for conservation, education, supplemental income and cultural preservation.

It is useful that Goodwin notes that there is "no agreement about the meaning of CBT and that whenever the words are used the meaning needs to be made clear." I think that community OWNERSHIP and foreign ownership should be distinguished from each other. That is again where the PROCESS comes in.

Clearly there is a learning curve for //campesino// communities that are learning how to own and manage successful tourism projects. Community owned ANYTHING involves a learning curve in our present societies, as anyone who has participated in the running of a community food coop or any local government will recognize. But food coops in the US have learned and grown, often as a result of the very specialized help that cooperative development organizations have provided to coop boards and communities.

Organizations that are very familiar with the pitfalls of food coop development have assisted local food coops in overcoming these pitfalls. In a similar way, ACTUAR, acting as an umbrella group for various community-owned tourism projects throughout Costa Rica, provides training in organizational development, business management, tour guide training, marketing, customer service, quality control, navigating liability insurance, interfacing with the national tourism board, etc. required for community owned tourism projects to be successful.

Using the characteristics of CBT defined by Goodwin, I can say that the successful community owned projects that are members of ACTUAR provide, to varying degrees

• benefits going to individuals or households in the community • collective benefits – creation of assets which are used by the community as a whole, roads, schools, clinics etc • community benefits where there is a distribution of benefit to all households in the community • conservation initiatives with community and collective benefits • community owned and managed enterprises • private sector enterprises with community benefits • product networks developed for marketing tourism in a local area. • community enterprise within a broader co-operative

The one criteria that is slightly different from the Yachana model is "joint ventures with community and/or collective benefits, including an anticipated transfer of management." In various ACTUAR projects, community members, some of whom have have university degrees, have become the focalizers of community tourism projects. Their objective is to initiate programs that will benefit both conservation and their communities as a whole. They often become the managers of community tourism projects because of their commitment and vision, and often they receive a salary from the community organization that they have helped to found. But often these people lack tourism and business experience, unlike the entrepreneurs who have founded successful tourism projects that benefit communities, like Yachana.

In the latest edition of my book, The New Key to Costa Rica, i decided to include tourism projects that were owned by foreigners who have years of experience and residency in Costa Rica, like Finca Luna Nueva in San Isidro de Peñas Blancas, and Rancho Margot near El Castilo, on the west side of Arenal Volcano, because the dynamic foreign born entrepreneur/owners started these projects with the same impulse to benefit their local communities as the Costa Ricans who start projects that are members of ACTUAR. And often the foreign-owned projects are more successful economically at this point than many ACTUAR projects, because of the connections, marketing, and internet savvy of the owners.

I want to point out that some ACTUAR communities are lead by //campesinos//, some by university trained people, but they all work together to make ACTUAR what it is. ACTUAR grew very rapidly with Bernarda Morales, an indigenous leader with not much formal education, but with tremendous vision and spirit, as the president of the board of directors. You can see an example of the project she leads in her BriBri community of Yorkín, with a few moments of her talking about the way the project benefits the community here: []

Now the president of ACTUAR is a university professor. The director of ACTUAR's travel agency, Kyra Cruz, has years of experience as a professional in the travel industry. They all work together within the progressive values that characterize Costa Rican history and society. That is why i talk about the way that Costa Rican history and social movements have created a CLIMATE in which community owned projects have a chance of success.

The biodiversity of the Costa Rican rainforest developed in response to the needs of plants, animals, insects and birds to find the niche that would guarantee their survival. I see the process of communities working together to learn how to SURVIVE in the harsh climate of "tourism development" as a similar process. ACTUAR is trying to provide the tools needed by these communities.

I am interested in knowing if the distinctions I have made up til now are useful as a jumping off point for further discussion of Goodwin's article, which I find helpful in clarifying a little-known field, rather than depressing.

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