Limitations of Local Community to Participate in Community-Based Tourism (CBT): A Study on Sylhet

Abstract

Community-Based Tourism is one of the emerging ideas of ensuring community’s participation in tourism developments as a contrivance of sustainability. And Sylhet is one of the naturally blessed areas in Bangladesh with tea-garden, waterfalls, tropical forests, community people and religious view. But Community people have lack interest on the participation of tourism activities due to different reasons. The main objective of this article is to identify the major limitations to community’s participation in Community-Based-Tourism in Sylhet region. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis is done for identifying those limitations. Regression analysis as well as other measurements was used to analyze the opinions/factors found from questionnaire survey. This paper identifies some limitations which are considered as the major reasons of community people’s poor participation such as poor communication skill and expertise of community people, low benefit sharing opportunity, poor decision making opportunity of them, poor knowledge ,insufficient marketing and financial supports . It also presents necessary recommendations based on the findings of the analysis on how these limitations could be removed and ensures more community participation in tourism development of that region.

Keywords: Community participation,tourism and Community-Based Tourism (CBT), major limitations.

DOI: 10.7176/JTHS/45-03

Publication date: December 31^st 2019