Assessing the Typology of Community Participation in Wonchi Crater Lake Ecotourism Development, Ethiopia

Abstract

This study purports to investigate the typology of local community participation in Wonchi Crater Lake Ecotourism development. Being designed to be cross-sectional descriptive, the study used simple random and purposive sampling to contact individual observation. The data collected from primary and secondary sources were analyzed using both the descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings demonstrated that the participation of local community members in planning, decision making and evaluation of ecotourism was extremely poor compared to other participation indices. On the whole, their participation level is found somewhere at induced level of Tosun’s typology. The findings cannot be generalized to other settings with no common features though it yet gives a solid foundation on the issue under the study.

Keywords: ecotourism, community participation, typology, Wonchi Crater Lake