Evaluating Community-Based Ecotourism in Scotland - Case of the North Harris Trust

Evaluating Community-

Based

Ecotourism

in Scotland

Case of The North Harris Trust

Daan de Bruin – s4473183 First supervisor: Dr. A. P. H. Geurts Second supervisor: Dr. M. A. van den Haak

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Content

1.3 The aim and questions of this research ... 7

1.4 Preview methodology ... 8

1.5 COVID-19 implications ... 9

1.6 Reader’s guide... 9

Chapter 2. Methodology and theoretical framework ... 10

2.1 Methodology ... 10

2.2 Theoretical framework ... 12

2.2.1 Ecotourism ... 12

2.2.2 Community-based ecotourism ... 13

Chapter 3. Content analysis of the North Harris Trust documents ... 23

3.1 Case description ... 23

3.2 The website ... 24

3.3 The available monthly and annual reports of 2017-2019 ... 27

3.4 The interviews ... 44

3.5 Conclusion ... 51

Chapter 4. Conclusion ... 54

4.1 Comparison of scholarly research and NHT practice ... 54

4.2 Further research... 60

4.3 Limitations ... 61

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Abstract

In this thesis, the evaluation of community-based ecotourism (CBET) is investigated. Most of the research in this field is situated outside of Europe, which is the first reason why a European case study has been chosen for this dissertation, that case being the North Harris Trust (NHT). The second reason why such a case study in Europe is relevant is because Europe is the most visited region in the world1. The NHT is an organisation that operates on the North Harris estate, part of one of the islands of the archipelago the Outer Hebrides, on the North-West of Scotland. The goal of this research is to discover the differences and similarities in the way of evaluating CBET between the European case and the non-European cases already researched in the literature. To be able to compare those two kinds of cases, theoretical scholarship, and literature in which the theory has been applied to case studies are analysed and compared to an analysis of the practices at the North Harris Trust. The focus in the analyses is on the criteria and methods used in evaluation of CBET.

The comparison of the literature and the practical NHT sources such as the website, minutes, and interviews with NHT officials shows that the evaluation of CBET in non-European cases does not differ much from the evaluation of CBET in Europe. The main difference is that the North Harris Trust does not have specific criteria and methods to evaluate tourism and the scholarly literature does offer this. The differences found form a new motivation for extra research, to be able to refine the existing criteria and methods for evaluating community-based ecotourism.

Author’s note

After finishing the premaster Environment and Society Studies at the Nijmegen School of Management, I missed the faculty of Arts. Therefore, and because I find tourism an interesting study subject, I chose to do the master Tourism and Culture. However, I did want to keep focussing on sustainability, hence my choice for sustainable tourism as the subject of my master’s thesis. I want to thank my parents for their support and acquainting me with the case study of this dissertation, the North Harris Trust. Without this I would not have found this specific type of tourism and would not have gotten to know more about this interesting subject. I thank my girlfriend Ruby for all her support during the process of writing this thesis. She served as my motivating writing companion and was always glad to help me with the necessary feedback on my progress. I also want to thank my friends for studying together and telling me to keep working on my thesis. Especially Miguel, with whom I often studied together, and Mathijs who made the effort to completely review my thesis, due to which I was able to improve the final product as much as possible.

Lastly, I want to thank my supervisor Anna Geurts for guiding me in choosing a research angle, handing me the skills needed to conduct this research and keeping me – more or less – on track for making the deadlines. At some point, I drifted off and did not attend to writing my thesis that much, but after another productive meeting and being in lockdown at home anyway, I regained my motivation to finish my work before the next academic year. On top of that, her feedback was always critical yet constructive. It was not always an easy or exciting project, but it was a pleasure to have been guided by her in this process.

1 https://www.unwto.org/news/tourisms-growth-across-all-regions-strengthens-sectors-potential-to-contribute-to-sustainable-development-agenda

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Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1 Cause

According to the latest World Tourism Barometer by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), tourism is one of the largest sectors in the world and it is still growing steadily: destinations worldwide received over 1.1 billion international tourist arrivals throughout 2019, a rise of more than 43 million in comparison to 2018. Tourism generated 1.7 trillion United States Dollars in revenues as of 2018 and is therefore the third biggest export category in the world2. However, as tourism is an industry of such international magnitude, it also has a substantial impact on the environment. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid in December 2019, the UNWTO secretary-general Zurab Pololikashvili stated3: “With the growth of opportunities in the tourism sector, its environmental impact also rises, and therefore its responsibility to take action against climate change and protect the future world also rises”.

The development of tourism has been studied for decades. In 1980, Richard Butler (1980) published an article about the ‘Tourist Area Life Cycle’ (TALC). He described a general lifecycle for tourist areas in which he claimed that any tourist area or attraction would always face decline and would be inherently finite. The concept of a Tourist Area Life Cycle became very popular, but was also heavily criticised, mainly because it would be too broad and hard to apply to specific cases. 26 years after publishing it, the TALC concept is still used, but also still contested (Butler et al, 2006a, 2006b).

Another issue with the TALC is that it implies that all tourism areas are finite and thus, that tourism would be inherently unsustainable. As stated above, the impact of tourism is increasing, which calls for tourism to become more sustainable. If this will not happen, tourism will continue to grow and negatively impact the natural and social environment. Thinking within the frame of the TALC, a more sustainable way of tourism is an impossible goal to reach because it describes an inherently unsustainable process.

Despite the possibility of a rejuvenation of a tourist area, Butler (1980) states a tourist area will eventually decline in popularity among visitors and tourism as an industry will bleed out, making it an unsustainable finite process. One day tourists will stop visiting an area, all the investors will leave, and the locals will be left with unnecessary touristic infrastructure because there are no tourists. Apart from that, a big part of the area’s economy was based on tourism in the peak phases (according to the

2 https://www.unwto.org/news/tourisms-growth-across-all-regions-strengthens-sectors-potential-to-contribute-to-sustainable-development-agenda UNWTO 12-12-2019

3 https://www.unwto.org/news/tourisms-growth-across-all-regions-strengthens-sectors-potential-to-contribute-to-sustainable-development-agenda UNWTO 12-12-2019

5 TALC), the area’s economy depended on that industry. Losing this industry will then cause a collapse of the area’s economy. On top of the socioeconomic sustainability of tourism, environmental sustainability is also an issue. And as stated by the secretary-general of the UNWTO, the tourism sector can play a big role in finding concrete solutions for climate emergency by becoming more sustainable4.

1.2 Relevance

Despite the unsustainable process the TALC describes, the generally recognised conviction among tourism scholars is that tourism can be sustainable. However, for that to be possible, it should be community-based (among others: Richards & Hall, 2006; Mostafanezhad, Norum, Shelton & Thompson-Carr, 2016; Walter, 2019). The community of the touristic site itself should play a big role in the process of tourism development in order to make this touristic site more sustainable (Jones, 2005; Pookhao, 2014; Williams, 2003). Ross and Wall (1999a; 1999b) found that the most crucial components in developing Community-Based Tourism are sustainability, conservation and development. Leite (2011) gives one of the possible explanations of why community participation would make tourism more sustainable: encounters between visitors and locals can generate lasting transnational ties. This means that when people visit a place and experience encounters with local community, they build up ties with the destination and its inhabitants, which makes it more likely those visitors will return to the area. More return visits make a tourism area more sustainable because it ensures a more stable income for the area. Those return visitors might also behave more environmentally responsible because of their connection and investment in the area of earlier visits. On top of that, they are acquainted with the area and its rules. If the organisation of tourism is based on community involvement, then the chance of this kind of encounter increases. Community involvement in tourism development is crucial to make it sustainable, not only environmentally, but also socially (Leite, 2011). Therefore, community involvement in tourism areas is at the core of this research, it enhances the sustainability of tourism areas.

An inevitable point of attention in this research paper will be the choice of terminology. In the available scholarly literature different terms to describe sustainable tourism based on community involvement are circulating and seem to mean somewhat, though not entirely the same: ‘Ecotourism’, ‘community-based ecotourism’, ‘community-based tourism’, ‘sustainable community tourism’, ‘community tourism development within a sustainable framework’. The term used in this research

4 https://www.unwto.org/news/tourisms-growth-across-all-regions-strengthens-sectors-potential-to-contribute-to-sustainable-development-agenda UNWTO 12-12-2019

6 paper will be ‘community-based ecotourism’. Hereafter these terms will be explained further and a definition for the term community-based ecotourism is given.

Community-based ecotourism consists of two parts: community and ecotourism. Chandel and Mishra (2016) have defined certain important aspects of ‘ecotourism’. Firstly, nature-oriented travel and support of conservation are discussed. Secondly, education on and appreciation of local culture and nature. Thirdly, they state the local area needs to benefit from ecotourism socioeconomically and there needs to be support and respect for the local culture(s). Lastly, participation in the organisation of tourism by the locals is also an important characteristic of ecotourism according to Chandel and Mishra. In this research, the term of choice is the more specific community-based ecotourism. Community-based ecotourism (CBET) is a type of ecotourism which is managed by members of the host community and whose goal it is to reach economic and natural sustainability for the local area. Although often the case, CBET does not necessarily revolve around natural areas, the ‘eco’ part can also stand for environmental sustainability. This definition will be further elaborated on in the theoretical framework of this dissertation.

However, it is impossible to know whether touristic practices of an organisation or region are sustainable without evaluation of the tourism practices in this region. On top of that, evaluation reveals what should change to make such practices more sustainable. Therefore, the present work will not only focus on community-based ecotourism, but more specifically on the evaluation of it.

An important motivation to do this research with this case study is that the research done in the field of community-based ecotourism (CBET) is one-sided. It is mainly focused on communities in Asia or Africa. Examples of this will be discussed in the chapter about the theoretical framework. A reason for this disbalance in representation might be that European scholars associate the term ‘community’ more with those non-European regions than with Europe. Another possible explanation might be that the European people might be more individualistic than the people living in Asia and Africa, who might have a more communal culture and tradition.

Not only are these projects one-sided in geographical focus, the scholarly literature on the evaluation of community-based tourism or sustainable community tourism is either very broad or rather case-specific. Some studies have developed case-specific criteria, while others have developed generic criteria. The case-specific criteria are unfit for application on other cases and the generic studies mostly result into a long list of criteria, which also makes it unfit for practical application.

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1.3 The aim and questions of this research

This one-sided view on CBET should be widened and the evaluation of this type of tourism in scholarly literature ought to be possible more specifically. The current dissertation aims to fill this scholarly void by asking in what ways CBET is already being evaluated in scholarship and looking at a different geographical location. Currently the geographical regions that are better represented in this specific field of research are regions in Asia and Africa. Whilst Europe is the world’s most visited region5_{, it would be a valid choice to focus on CBET in this important tourism region.}

To achieve this aim, a case study in Scotland is used. A community that was established relatively recently and where the tourism organisation seems to be going fairly well on the face of it: The North Harris Trust. North Harris is an estate and part of the Isle of Harris. Harris lies on the north-west of Scotland and is a part of the archipelago the Outer Hebrides. The area is known for its unique natural environment. North Harris houses a community of approximately one thousand inhabitants. In 2003 the locals found that the (ageing) society was no longer able to sustain the economy and the community on the island. This development of an ageing society was caused by a lot of young people leaving the remote estate, motivated by an apparent lack of job opportunities in North Harris. Part of the solution the locals had for this was to develop more visitor facilities. This meant a new industry was established in the area. It provided jobs and attracted more tourists and thus generated income for the society. In a ten-year period, between 2003 and 2013, the initiators collectively and gradually bought the ground of the estate from the different separated owners and eventually started a trust (2010).

The trust is governed by a board of thirteen: twelve elected local directors who represent defined township areas and a representative of the John Muir Trust6. The John Muir Trust is a Scottish trust that safeguards wild lands and promotes awareness and recognition of the value such places hold. This trust facilitates the North Harris Trust financially, practically and with staff.7 Among the improvements the Trust wanted to make are: better and more housing for residents; facilities for tourists; employment for (young) residents; and care-taking of the natural surroundings.

5 https://www.unwto.org/news/tourisms-growth-across-all-regions-strengthens-sectors-potential-to-contribute-to-sustainable-development-agenda

6 _{North Harris Trust, Introduction the The Trust, https://www.north-harris.org/?page_id=3243 consulted 06-15-2020} 7 _{North Harris Trust, Partnership with the John Muir Trust, https://www.north-harris.org/?page_id=45 consulted on} 06-15-2020

8 The main question in researching this Scottish community and the way this trust evaluates the tourism practice there, will be as follows: How does the North Harris Trust evaluate tourism in the European

region of North Harris, and how can we use this information to refine existing criteria and methods for the evaluation of community-based ecotourism more generally, which so far have either been suggested in the theoretical literature or stem from the practical evaluation of non-European cases?

In order to answer the main question, the following sub-questions need to be asked:

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1.4 Preview methodology

This research consists of two main parts: an in-depth review of the existing literature and an investigation of the practice and evaluation of tourism on The North Harris Trust on the basis of interviews held with people who play a key role in the North Harris community by performing a management role in the trust. Due to the COVID-19 crisis I was no longer able to go to the isle personally for the research. Because of this the interviews were held online, via Jitsi. I interviewed the manager of the trust, who also has been ranger on North Harris, Michael Hunter, and the chairman of the board of directors, Calum MacKay.

In addition to the interviews, the trust’s website, the minutes of the board meetings and the yearly and monthly reports were also analysed by means of a content analysis. These documents are all available on the Trust’s website and open for anyone to read8. The focus was on the reports of the last three years, as older ones might not be relevant anymore. These analyses are meant to identify evaluative tools the North Harris Trust uses to evaluate their community-based ecotourism area.

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1.5 COVID-19 implications

The work on this thesis started before the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak. Nonetheless is the importance of reflecting on the potential influence of this pandemic on the kind of tourism that is researched evident. It is obvious that the COVID-19 crisis is of great influence on the tourism sector while for a long time (inter)national tourism has not been possible. However, this offers a great opportunity to critically reflect on the way we travel and our tourism practices. As was established earlier on in this introduction, before the crisis the environmental impact of tourism on our planet was increasingly becoming more substantial. All the more reason to seize this opportunity and make sure the tourism of tomorrow is more sustainable than the one we had before the crisis.

CBET will potentially not be affected as severely as other types of tourism might be by this pandemic. Generally, tourism organised by a host community is small in scale. This means that potential social-distancing measures might have some impact on the industry, but not to the same extent as they would have on mass tourism. Mass tourism includes big groups of people travelling to the same sight and a set holiday program for those big groups (Pigram and Wahab, 2005). The large number of people would form a problem with the COVID-19 measures being implemented in society. Because CBET generally is a small-scale practice, it might be easier to implement the social distancing measures.

1.6 Reader’s guide

The upcoming chapter of the current thesis elaborates on the definitions, the theory and the methodology used as the basis of this current paper. In that chapter, the practical and the theoretical scholarly articles on the evaluations of CBET are compared too. From that part will be concluded what the current set of criteria and methods to evaluate CBET is, in theoretical versus practical research. Those results will be compared and using those the first three sub-questions will be answered. In continuation, in the third chapter, the content analysis on the North Harris Trust will be performed. This entails the analyses of the monthly and annual reports of the last three years and the interviews held with volunteers from the trust. That chapter answers the fourth sub-question. In chapter four the analysis of the European practice and the analysis of the non-European literature will be compared to answer the fifth sub-question. In conclusion, the main research question of this dissertation will be answered.

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Chapter 2. Methodology and theoretical framework

2.1 Methodology

The data-collection for this research is based on what Alain Decrop (1999, p. 159) calls ‘data triangulation’: the use of a variety of data sources in the study of one phenomenon. The data used for this study comes from three different sources: scholarly literature, the minutes and the website of the NHT organisation and interviews with NHT officials. A content analysis of the available scholarly literature on the different criteria and methods used in the evaluation of community-based ecotourism and a content analysis of sources coming from the North Harris Trust are conducted in order to discover the differences between the two. Like with the literature analysis, in the analysis of the NHT-sources, the focus is on what criteria and methods the North Harris Trust uses to evaluate tourism on North Harris. The NHT sources used in this research are the monthly minutes, the annual reports of the trust, the trust’s website, and the interviews with two officials of the trust.

In that analysis not every month from the past three years is represented in the minutes. A missing month could have several reasons: the staff did not meet that month; the minute of the meeting was not uploaded or that specific meeting did not include subjects of interest to this study. It is unknown to me what the reason for missing minutes might be. The annual reports are compiled of different texts in which all the staff members of the trust individually look back on the year from their task-specific point of view. The following are part of the annual reports: Chairman’s Comments, Manager’s report, Ranger’s report, Senior Development Officer’s Report, Development Officer’s report, Financial Statement, Directors Information and Staff Information. The annual reports are meant as a reference book for people interested in the trust, this could be people from outside the staff or community, staff members looking back at earlier years or persons that are part of the community and want to know what the staff of the trust do for the trust and the community.

Aside from adding one more source to the data triangulation, the additional value of analysing the website of the organisation is that it shows what the NHT wants to portray to the public. The monthly minutes and annual reports on the other hand show the actual daily practice of the trust and give a more in-depth insight into what the goals are, why these are the goals and what methods the trust intends to use to evaluate the reaching of those goals.

I also conducted semi-structured interviews online. This not only made it possible to confirm the online NHT sources, but more importantly, it allowed for retrieving new, more in-depth information (Picken, 2018, p. 200-223). Conducting these interviews, I made use of Jitsi, a program that offers the possibility of recording online video calls. The method for this part of the thesis is based upon the chapter The Interview in Tourism Research, part of ‘Qualitative Methods in Tourism Research:

11 Theory and Practice’, published in Aspects of Tourism and edited by Wendy Hillman and Kylie Radel. This interview strategy also allows space for follow-up questions and side-tracks if interesting subjects arise.

The interviewees are and Michael Hunter (Manager of the NHT) and Calum MacKay (Chair of the NHT council of directors). They are experts on the North Harris Trust, which makes interviews held with them valid sources for this research.

The questions that were asked during the interviews served as a means to affirm the findings in the content analyses and to deepen the understanding of the discovered goals of the NHT and what criteria and methods the NHT uses to assess their functioning. Below follows a list of the interview questions.

- Have you ever heard of community-based ecotourism?

o Does scholarly research play a role in the North Harris Trust? o Do you as an organisation conduct research into the trust?

- Would you agree with a description of North Harris Trust tourism as community-based ecotourism - or are important components missing in this description?

- What are the goals of the North Harris Trust?

o What are your goals with it and what would you ideally like to see as its goals? o Do you feel you are on the way to reaching these goals?

o How do you evaluate the organisation at the North Harris Trust?

- How do you as an organisation evaluate yourselves and what criteria and methods do you use for this?

- What is the situation like now with the COVID-19 crisis?

One could say that this study's main focus on the NHT makes it a shortcoming in terms of studying CBET evaluations in Europe, while it is only one case. Nevertheless, every beginning is a beginning, however small it may be. The NHT as a case study is a good choice for making this beginning, while it is a ‘typical’ case in the terms of John Gerring (2009, p. 3). He describes a typical case as ‘a typical example of some cross-case relationship’. CBET is the cross-case relationship here and the NHT is a typical example of community-based ecotourism while it is an organisation that facilitates sustainable tourism based on community participation. The reason why a case study was chosen as one of the ways to collect data is to test if the criteria and methods to evaluate CBET that are found in the non-European literature are the same in a non-European case and could thus be seen as generic criteria and methods to evaluate CBET. In the terms of John Gerring: test the applicability of a thus far non-European hypothesis on the basis of a typical case in Europe.

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2.2 Theoretical framework

The sources used for this chapter were found in the University Library of the Radboud University: online (RUQuest) as well as in the physical library. The Platform Academia.edu9 was also used. The key terms searched for were ‘ecotourism’, ‘community-based ecotourism’, ‘CBET’, ‘sustainable tourism’, ‘community tourism’ or those terms combined with ‘evaluation of’. The online queries brought up a set of tourism journals among which The International Journal of Tourism Research,

Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management and Journal of Ecotourism. Another way through

which sources were found was snowballing: using the bibliography of scholarly articles as the source of other relevant articles for this research. In selecting my sources, I tried to combine sources that lie at the foundation of ecotourism (Ross and Wall (1999), Butler (1980, 2006, 2006) or Weaver (2005)) with more recent research. Besides that, I selected theoretical research as well as journal articles in which theories were applied to cases.

Community-based ecotourism consists of two main parts: ecotourism and community-based tourism. Scholarship on the most important aspects of both is discussed hereafter. Combining the findings of these articles, a description of what is understood to be community-based ecotourism will be constructed. The first subject at hand is ecotourism, this is followed by community-based tourism.

2.2.1 Ecotourism

In this segment, the most important aspects of ecotourism will be discussed based on what ecotourism used to mean and what is currently understood by the term. David B. Weaver, geographer of tourism, states that ever since the term ‘ecotourism’ was first coined in 1985, it has become a popular tourism practice and a popular subject for tourism scholars. It is sometimes also referred to as “nature tourism” or “ecological tourism” (Weaver, 2005).

In a later scholarly article, Abhinav Chandel and Sita Mishra (2016) analysed the existing literature on ecotourism to discover the principal components of ecotourism. They define certain recurring themes that were found in the different definitions of ecotourism that are used. Besides that, they also considered in what percentage of the definitions these themes were recognised. In total, they found 16 themes that were recurring in various definitions of ecotourism throughout the scholarly field. They found that five of those 16 themes implied the local community as a part of the definition of ecotourism. Hereafter, each of those themes is presented and the percentage of times it recurred in a definition of ecotourism is between brackets: ‘Socioeconomic Development of Local Area’ (57%), ‘Support and Respect for Local Culture’ (43%), ‘Local Area (People) Participation’ (33%), ‘Support

13 Human Rights’ (2%), and ‘Volunteer Assistance’ (2%). The first three are themes that appear to form part of definitions of ecotourism relatively often. They are in the top 6 of the 16 most recurring themes in definitions of ecotourism in scholarly literature, according to Chandel and Mishra. The only themes that were found in definitions of ecotourism more often were ‘Nature Oriented Travel’ (76%), ‘Supports Conservation’ (76%) and ‘Learning and education’ (57%) (Chandel and Mishra, 2016). That means that a general definition of ecotourism would probably describe an important role for the local community and incorporate the top three themes named before.

What they also stated in their conclusion is that the use of the key-term ‘community-based tourism’ in ecotourism definitions had been increasing a lot in recent years (Chandel and Mishra, 2016, p. 149-150). So, what the terms ‘ecotourism’ and ‘community-based ecotourism’ entail appears to be getting closer to one another and most ecotourism is also community-based tourism. Notwithstanding, it is impossible to state that ecotourism is always community-based tourism or vice versa. Sometimes ecotourism still just means tourism to natural areas.

2.2.2 Community-based ecotourism

In this section scholarly theory will be used to specify the role communities must play in the organisation of tourism, for it to be considered community-based. As stated in the introduction, the term ‘community-based ecotourism’ will be used in this paper. Based on the findings of Chandel and Mishra (2016), community-based ecotourism (CBET) can be defined as a type of ecotourism which is nature oriented, managed by members of the host community, whose goal it is to reach economic and natural sustainability for the local area and the type of tourists they attract must be considerate of and interested in learning about the locals and their environment.

When talking about ‘community-based ecotourism’, it is necessary to know what is meant by the term ‘community’. As is the case with the North Harris Trust, the available examples of CBET in the scholarly literature talked about a community when talking about a relatively small group of people who all lived in the same region. Most of the case studies are in non-urban areas, away from cities and surrounded by nature. Which would most likely mean that the community is quite closed off from the rest of the country it forms part of and possibly operates solely on itself, without outside interference. In the North Harris Trust the community consists of about 1.000 residents of North Harris and Mr Hunter himself said that all the residents of the geographical region North Harris belong to the community.

Communities can play different roles in the organisation of tourism. Regarding the present research, the evaluation of community-based ecotourism will be looked at.

14 As stated before, the most striking gap in this particular field of study is the lack of research into what criteria and methods are being used to evaluate community-based ecotourism cases in Europe, this deserves more attention. To fill this theoretical gap, this section highlights the available criteria and methods of evaluation. To show some important characteristics of specifically community-based ecotourism – as opposed to ecotourism –, a content analyses of various studies into this type of tourism will be done and the criteria for what is generally understood to be community-based tourism will be filtered out.

Evaluation is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “the process of judging or calculating the quality, importance, amount or value of something”10_{. For the evaluation of CBET that would mean}

that evaluation is meant to discover whether the process of organising sustainable tourism on the basis of community-participation is actually leading to sustainability and is meeting the requirements defined by the community and the organisation itself.

Firstly, the findings of the analysis of the theoretical literature are presented, after which the practical literature and the geographical disbalance in these case studies will be expounded.

Theoretical research

Because no theoretical research on the evaluation of community-based ecotourism specifically was found, the sources used in this section are very much related to this type of tourism. CBET fits under the umbrella of community-based tourism or sustainable community tourism. Hereafter, the content of three theoretical research papers in this field are discussed and it is explained what those scholars deem important criteria for the evaluation of community-based ecotourism.

In general, in the theoretical research, four criteria for the evaluation of community-based ecotourism are recurrent:

1. Locals need to benefit from tourism socioeconomically 2. Tourist facilities need to be maintained properly 3. The protection of the natural and cultural heritage

4. Education on environmental awareness among locals and tourists

The theory per article is elaborated on below. At the end of each discussed article, a summary of the criteria for evaluation of CBET that can be deduced from that article is given and this will

15 cumulatively be compared to the other articles. At the end, a table is presented in which an overview of all the criteria per article are shown.

Choi and Sirakaya – interrelationship between stakeholders in sustainable community development

Choi and Sirakaya (2005) used stakeholder theory to examine the interrelationship between stakeholders in sustainable community tourism development. They did this and developed a 125 items long list of indicators to measure community tourism development within a sustainable framework. By measuring the development, they evaluate sustainable community tourism. This list is divided into six dimensions and meant to be applied to specific cases, but its length makes that impractical. Choi and Sirakaya focused on the development of tourism with a basis in the local community and looked at this kind of tourism through a sustainable framework. Because of this, their research is also relevant when looking at community-based ecotourism. They set up a list of dimensions and indicators that are essential for the development of sustainable community tourism. While this list is too extensive for this research, we will focus on the top three indicators of community tourism development per dimension (see table 1).

The indicators were selected through a Delphi method: three rounds of discussions in which a panel of 37 academics in the field of tourism came to a consensus of 125 indicators on the basis of which community tourism development can be measured. These scholars were selected in several ways: six sustainable tourism specialists recommended potential panellists and potential panellists were drawn from a list of eighty authors who had published at least one peer reviewed paper on sustainable tourism development in journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research,

Tourism Management and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. Thereafter the study used snowball

sampling using a group of 25 internationally recognized tourism scholars identified by the Delphi board. These academics were then asked to offer potential panel members for this research. Those lists were then cross-checked for double names and a list of 45 scholars came out as a result. 37 of those 45 experts in the field of sustainable tourism scholarship participated. This group was then asked to thoroughly review the relevant scholarly literature and afterwards develop their own definition and identify essential principles of sustainable tourism. On this basis they were asked to formulate a list of sustainable tourism indicators useful to monitor progress or problem areas. (Choi & Sirakaya 2005).

The six dimensions they divided these indicators in are the following: political (32 indicators), social (28), ecological (25), economic (24), technological (3) and cultural (13) (Choi & Sirakaya, 2005). The scholars participating in the Delphi discussion also appointed scores to the importance of the indicators, this led to a mean score per indicator, stated on the right side in the table below.

16 Table 1. Objective indicators of each dimension (Choi & Sirakaya, 2005, p. 1284).

The above dimensions and indicators are, according to Choi and Sirakaya, important when managing sustainable community tourism development. This would mean that, when evaluating CBET, these would be the primary criteria to look at, according to Choi and Sirakaya.

Concluding, when looking at the top indicator of each dimension, according to Choi & Sirakaya (2005) the criteria for success of a sustainable community tourism area are (1) the availability of local credit for local business, (2) how much residents are involved in the tourism industry, (3) the availability of cultural site maintenance funding and resources, (4) the quality of the air based on an index, (5) the availability and level of land zoning policy and (6) that data is collected accurately. However, this is a very small selection of the criteria they offer and is based on their ranking of these criteria per tourism dimension. The methods to evaluate CBET linked to these criteria are (1) checking if local credit is made available for local businesses, (2) monitor the percentage of locals involved in the tourism industry and define what would be sufficient, (3) check if there are funding and resources available for cultural site maintenance, (4) measure the quality of the air with the given index, (5) check if land zoning policy is available and (6) verify if the data that is used in the evaluation of tourism is correctly collected.

Ross and Wall – conservation and ecotourism in protected areas

Ross and Wall have also written about evaluating tourism. They do consider the local community, but do not see it as a central element of the tourism organisation. This means that the research is not

17 done in the context of community-based tourism. On top of that, their study was based on a case in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Ross and Wall researched the success of conservation and ecotourism in protected areas. According to them, this success depends on whether or not in this area there are ‘harmonious relationships between natural areas and locals, between local residents and tourism, and between tourism and protected resources, facilitated by management’ (Ross & Wall, 1999, p. 677). They visualise these relationships in figure 1. This figure shows the necessary relationships between the several components of ecotourism and what is necessary to keep these relationships alive: As opposed to the list of indicators that Choi and Sirakaya developed, Ross and Wall give fewer criteria that need to be met in protected natural areas where ecotourism takes place.

Figure 1. Tourism relationships (Ross & Wall, 1999, p. 674).

Apart from that, the application of the framework in this research has been done solely in North Sulawesi and on three different cases: all are national parks and thus protected areas. In comparison to the study of Choi & Sirakaya (2005) the result is much more focused in terms of criteria. However, this research is directed at ecotourism and not at community-based tourism. What can be interpreted based on Ross & Wall (1999) is that for tourism in national parks in North Sulawesi to be successful, it needs to be in balance with the local community, the biodiversity and the relationship between these three and the management and organizations need to be harmonious. The way they measure these is looking at (1) how much intercultural appreciation there is between locals and tourists and (2) how

18 much socio-economic benefits the locals get out of the tourists coming to their region. This latter is measured by comparing the situation before and after a rise of tourism. It was checked with locals if the received income from tourism and infrastructure before and after were compared. Another measurement is (3) how much revenues of tourism income go to protection of the local area and (4) how much environmental education directed at tourists takes place. On top of that, a measure is (5) how many environmental advocacy there is among the local community and (6) that sustainable resource use should be integrated in the local community. Measurements of success concerning the management are whether (7) maintenance and provision of tourist facilities is taking place, (8) monitoring of research programs done by outside organisations (e. g. International Wildlife Conservation Society, World Wildlife Fund International) and (9) enforcement of restrictions on tourists and locals that safeguard the biological diversity takes place. Furthermore, a measurement is if (10) outreach programs towards and enforcement of Use Zones (specifically appointed zones in which the natural resources can be used) on the local community is taking place. In this study, the criteria lean more towards natural area protection than in the first research that was discussed. However, this is logical because the second research was aimed at ecotourism and the first one towards sustainable community tourism.

Ashok et al – ecotourism principles and criteria

In the work of Ashok et al (2017), by means of the Delphi method, a set of ecotourism principles and criteria was defined and modified according to the local situation in a top-down approach. As an addition to that, in a bottom-up approach, destination-specific indicators and their verifiers had been developed. This was done in focus group discussions and participatory workshops for the locals, with productive involvement of local experts and ecotourism service providers. The destination-specific indicators are not of interest for the present research because a different case study is at hand. The general ecotourism principles and criteria per principle, however, are of interest for this research. In table 2 (see below), the four different principles of ecotourism sustainability assessment (ESA) and the eight different criteria per principle are shown. The four principles are: (1) Protection of natural and cultural resources, (2) generation of socio-economic benefit to the local community, (3) generation of environmental awareness, and (4) capacity building and optimization of touristic aspirations. In this research they aim to find out what criteria to base an assessment of ecotourism on, this is comparable to the article of Ross & Wall who looked at the evaluation criteria of ecotourism too.

19 Table 2. Criteria per ecotourism principle (Ashok et al., 2017, p. 37)

Conclusion of theoretical literature

On the basis of the content analysis of the theoretical literature, it is hard to make a short list of criteria whereon community-based ecotourism can be evaluated whilst the available literature is not directed at CBET specifically, but at sustainable community tourism or ecotourism. However, CBET is very similar to these forms. What follows is a list of the recurring criteria and methods used to evaluate CBET found in the theoretical literature on how to evaluate sustainable community tourism and ecotourism. The list is in a random, non-hierarchical order.

1. Locals need to benefit from tourism socioeconomically 2. Tourist facilities need to be maintained properly 3. The protection of the natural and cultural heritage

4. Education on environmental awareness among locals and tourists

In table 3 the different criteria deduced from the theoretical literature are listed and the different articles are compared

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Choi & Sirakaya (2005) Ross & Wall (1999) Ashok et al (2017)

Availability of local credit for local business.

Socioeconomic benefits from tourists to locals.

Generation of socio-economic benefit to the local community.

How much residents are involved in the tourism industry.

Outreach programs and enforcement of Use Zones.

Availability of cultural site maintenance fund and resources.

Maintenance and provision of tourist facilities.

Optimization of tourist aspirations.

Quality of the air based on an index.

Revenues of income go to protected area.

Protection of natural and cultural resources.

Availability and level of land zoning policy.

Enforcement of restrictions regarding the biological diversity.

Data is collected accurately. Monitoring of research programs.

Environmental education directed at tourists.

Generation of environmental awareness and capacity building.

Environmental advocacy among locals.

Integrated resource use among locals.

Cultural appreciation between locals and tourists.

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Practical research

According to practical research, CBET has five features to be considered sustainable. It should have an educational function, attract environmentally responsible tourists, be socio-economically beneficial for the local community, increase social capital and empower the community. Table 4 gives an overview of the articles discussed in this section.

First, Pierre Walter (2019) writes on community-based ecotourism and how this can be compared to living museum practice as both are rich in experiential visitor learning. By means of the method of comparing museum practice with CBET cases, he evaluates the CBET cases on the experiential visitor learning part and shows how this could be done better. However, he uses cases in Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The criterion he deems important in CBET is the educational part of it, like education is important in museums. He states that for tourists to respect the local culture and environment, they need to be educated about this environment and about their impact on it as tourists.

Second, Tsung Hung-Lee and Fen-Hauh Jan (2019) investigate profiles of community-based tourists in Taiwan and their environmentally responsible behaviour (ERB). The criterion for evaluating CBET that can be deduced from this is that the tourists participating in tourism should, to some degree, handle the environment responsibly. This means that they are conscious of their impact on it and try to keep this impact as small as possible. So, they should not for example litter or harm in the environment. The method Hung-Lee and Jan used to evaluate if tourists were behaving environmentally responsible was quantitative research. They used questionnaire surveys that were afterwards statistically analysed.

Third, Nantira Pookhao (2014) looks at the transformation of local communities in CBET and bases her study only on cases in Thailand, the criterion that can be deduced from this is that the host community benefits from tourism socioeconomically. In this research, ethnographic techniques were applied to identify in-depth and various dimensions of the case. This was done on site, during one and a half months of fieldwork.

Fourth, Samantha Jones (2005) discusses the significance of social capital in CBET, with cases only in Gambia. An evaluative criterion that she seems to value is the social cohesion in the CBET community. The method she uses to evaluate how much and what kind of social capital there is in a community is a questionnaire with structured questions. Responses were then coded and given a score from -1 (high negative social capital) to 1 (high positive social capital). High positive social capital in this case was valuable social cohesion in a community.

Fifth, Moren Tibabo Stone (2015) has researched how CBET is perceived in terms of community participation and empowerment in Botswana. The evaluative criterion that can be deduced from this

22 is that CBET should go hand in hand with community participation and empowerment of the community. The method used to assess this was qualitative research in the form of semi-structured interviews. These interviews were held with officials and non-officials of the local community.

Criterion Method

Education needs to be part of the tourist experience.

Compare CBET cases with museum practice.

Environmentally responsible behaviour of tourists is required.

Conducting questionnaires among visitors and locals.

CBET should not change the CBET society negatively too much.

Using ethnographic techniques, identify in-depth dimensions of the case. Also, make sure the benefits from CBET are equally distributed, that is what changes the society negatively.

A CBET community needs to be socially cohesive.

Use a questionnaire that measures social cohesion/capital.

Community participation and empowerment of the community need to be a part of tourism organisation.

Count the locals participating, look at how much they do on their own and hold semi-structured interviews in which you try to find out the perception of ecotourism.

Table 4. Evaluative criteria and methods for CBET used in practical literature.

Concluding, in the scholarly literature a lot of different criteria to assess ecotourism in general have been developed and used. None of the evaluative literature is directed specifically at community-based ecotourism, however, there is practical scholarly literature within the field of tourism studies that implies the importance of some criteria of it. These implied criteria of CBET are for example whether or not education is involved in the tourist experience (Walter, 2019), if the tourist’s

behaviour is environmentally responsible enough (Hung-Lee and Jan, 2019), if the local community

gains enough social capital in the tourist area and organization (Jones, 2005) and the way in which CBET is perceived in terms of community participation and empowerment (Stone, 2015).

In general these criteria do not differ very much from what the theoretical literature provides: in those articles, the scholars mostly looked at if there is education about the natural environment involved in the tourist experience of the ecotourism region, if there is enough conservation of the local natural

and cultural resources at hand and if local community had enough socioeconomic benefits from the

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Chapter 3. Content analysis of the North Harris Trust documents

This chapter contains the analysis of the practical sources that are at hand for this research: the website of the North Harris Trust, the monthly minutes and the annual reports of the organisation and the interviews held with experts involved with the trust. In these analyses the focus will be on what criteria for success the North Harris Trust uses in its tourism practice. In each section, criteria for success will be filtered out to determine what the underlying criteria for success are for the North Harris Trust. However, before the analysis, a brief case description of the North Harris Trust will be presented.

3.1 Case description

Harris is an island that forms part of the Scottish archipelago the Outer Hebrides, which lays in the North Atlantic Ocean. North Harris forms a community that is defined by Michael Hunter as everything between Tarbert in the south, Huisinis in the west, Scalpaigh in the east and Bogha Glas in the north. Approximately 1.000 people live in this geographical region and the North Harris Trust was set up by locals to manage the estate.

One needs to know that the North Harris Trust is mainly a land and community maintaining organisation. Tourism is not at the core interest of the trust. This means that most of the meetings are more about how to maintain the lands, provide proper housing for the community or about work that needs to be done on the sustainable ways of generating electricity employed on the estate. This latter does link to the trust’s objective to maintain and develop the land in a sustainable way, tourism practice included. However, the link from this to tourism is indirect, as is the link from land maintaining or housing for locals. Only those matters that are deemed relevant for the evaluation of ecotourism are included in the analysis.

Three kinds of ‘members’ are mentioned in the NHT sources: staff members, community members and members of the trust. Staff members are the people who take part in the monthly meetings, the development, and the organisation of the facilitation of the trust. When ‘the trust’ or ‘NHT’ in any form is named in an active sentence, the staff members are meant. Community members are all the people living in the geographical location of North Harris. This is the geographical area the North Harris Trust serves according to Mr Hunter, the trust’s manager. The third kind of member is not of specific importance to this research but is important to mention: members of the trust. Everyone who is a resident of the estate, above sixteen years of age and pays £1 to the trust is member for life and entitled to one vote on key issues on the estate. However, the only thing that is being voted on seems to be the nomination of staff members and members of the board of directors. Those are not key tourism concerning issues, for that reason, those members of the trust will not be named specifically

24 anymore. According to Mr Hunter about one third of the residents of North Harris are members of the trust. But from here on forth in this document, the ‘members of the community’ are just the residents of North Harris: locals.

The main form of interaction the locals have with the trust is threefold: either the trust comes to them asking their opinion on an issue on the estate, they come to the trust to talk about a certain issue on the estate, or they have an arrangement with the trust where the trust (financially) facilitates them in pursuing a certain business proposal that the trust finds beneficial for the community and the estate in general and thus worthy of their investment.

Hereafter, the analysis of the various named sources is presented. Firstly, the website is studied, after which the analysis of the monthly minutes and yearly reports will follow and lastly the interviews with Michael Hunter and Calum MacKay are analysed.

3.2 The website

The first thing that is shown on the website is a short introduction of the estate and the trust. This introduction says:

“NORTH HARRIS

North Harris lies 17 miles off the North-Western tip of Scotland. A dramatic Atlantic coastline and a spectacular mountain range make this a very special place. Each year more and more nature and outdoor enthusiasts make this their holiday destination of choice. For those that are lucky enough to live here, it offers a far superior quality of life.”11

The use of the words ‘dramatic’ and ‘spectacular’ in the description of the nature of North Harris show that one of the goals of the trust with the website is to promote the destination as a sublime place to be. The fact that they state visitor numbers are rising each year also shows that they want to portray North Harris as an attractive destination for tourists. Besides that, they call the visitors ‘nature and outdoor enthusiasts’ which implies that this is the kind of visitors they want to attract. After that, it says that living there offers a ‘far superior quality of life’, again this shows that they promote the estate as a beautiful place to be. The fact that they are promoting the estate to non-inhabitants means that they want to attract visitors. This means that one of the criteria they would have in an evaluation of the tourism practice is obviously that they want sufficient visitors to come to the estate.

They continue to describe the function of the trust:

25 “The North Harris Trust manages the estate, on behalf of the community. It aims to build a stronger community and enhance its wonderful wild landscape. This website shows the work the Trust carries out and will give you a taste of what those that haven’t visited yet, are missing out on.”12

If an aim of an organisation is mentioned, reaching that goal logically becomes a criterion in the evaluation of the functioning of the organisation. The aims that the website names here are to build a stronger community on the estate and “enhance its wonderful wild landscape”. By ‘stronger community’ they probably mean that the participation rate of the locals in the affairs of the trust needs to be high and the people living in the community need to be close to one another. By ‘enhancing the wonderful wild landscape’ they probably mean that the natural environment needs to be taken care of in such a way that it is sustained and that it can grow freely. Another possible interpretation of this is that they want to make sure the natural environment is not harmed. The criteria to be met that can be filtered out of this are that the trust wants the locals to have close bonds amongst each other, be engaged in participating in the trust’s affairs and the landscape needs to be maintained properly.

On the website, there is also a page that specifically addresses the aims and objectives of the trust13_.

Knowing the aims and objectives, the criteria for evaluation can be deduced. The statement on what the aims of the trust are is as follows.

“To achieve the regeneration and development of the North Harris community by managing the North Harris Estate as an area of outstanding wild and rugged beauty, through local participation and working with other partners where appropriate, all for the benefit of the local community and the wider public.”

This general aim seems to stem from certain threats that are felt within the community. The threat that the community and its culture might disappear is clearly deductible from this statement. If the goal of regeneration and developing the North Harris community is not reached, the community will disappear and with it, the specific Gaelic culture and language they have there will disappear. The first aim is thus ‘regeneration and development of the North Harris community’. This means that they want to breathe new life into the community. That would mean attracting more young inhabitants and this way countering the aging society. The criteria for this would probably be more young inhabitants of the estate, so the percentage of locals below a certain age would need to be raised.

12 _{Website of the North Harris Trust https://www.north-harris.org/ consulted 23-06-2020}

26 They also state that the methods they use for reaching the aims are portraying and managing the North Harris Estate as an area of outstanding wild and rugged beauty, doing this through local participation and working with other partners where appropriate. This means that a criterion they want to meet as an organisation is that the estate is promoted as such an area, they want to keep up that image. Another criterion that comes from this text is that local participation needs to form part of the way the trust does things. The collaboration with other partners is not necessarily a criterion because it is only at hand when appropriate, so it is not essential to the trust.

This is the exact list of objectives they present on the website:

- "To formulate a strategy for community development with full participation of the community - To manage, conserve and develop the assets of the estate in a sustainable manner

- To keep North Harris wild and beautiful by safeguarding and enhancing the environment and managing this in ways that benefit the local community and the general public

- To generate awareness, understanding and appreciation of the cultural heritage of North Harris including the Gaelic language

- To facilitate appropriate community development by providing land and other resources for local housing, business, and community needs

- To encourage sustainable crofting development and regeneration

- To facilitate the maintenance and development of aquaculture enterprise and employment in a sustainable manner appropriate to the local area

- To facilitate the enjoyment of the natural heritage by enabling open responsible access for all - To facilitate the creation of native woodlands in appropriate areas

- To work with statutory bodies to improve local infrastructure and services”14

A further explanation of these aims and objectives is not available on the website.

From this list, we can conclude that one of the criteria the North Harris Trust uses to assess the success of the organisation is the sustainable development of the estate, both nature-wise and community-wise. They want to educate both locals and visitors about the local cultural heritage and a criterion that can be deduced from that is the locals and visitors appreciate and get to know the local cultural heritage. Another criterion they have is that enjoyment of the natural heritage is possible for everyone and that local infrastructure and services are well managed and maintained.

27 The list below sums up the criteria that the North Harris Trust implies in their aims and objectives.

Criteria:

- Enough visitors to the estate - Close bonds among the community

- High participation and engagement rate of the locals in the trust’s affairs - Increased percentage of young inhabitants

- Sustainable natural development of the estate

- Sustainable social/community development of the estate

- Appreciation for and knowledge about the local cultural heritage from both the locals and visitors

- Natural heritage open for enjoyment by all

- Local infrastructure and services are well managed and maintained

The NHT does not include information about the methods they use to evaluate CBET on the estate. As it is not clear from the website whether the NHT does actually evaluate itself and the community-based ecotourism on the estate, it is not possible to conclude methods of tourism evaluation from this. The other sources that will be analysed however, do allow for more methods of evaluation to be deduced.

3.3 The available monthly and annual reports of 2017-2019

In this section the online minutes of meetings and reports the NHT has available will be analysed. The managing staff and the directors take part in these meetings. The reports are yearly reports that are called ‘Annual report’, these include reports from several staff members. For example, the chairman, the manager, the ranger, the senior development officer, and the development officer. Besides that, it also includes a financial statement and a staff report.

In line with the analysis of the website itself the analysis will entail that specific criteria or methods to evaluate tourism will be deduced from the available information as much as possible if they are not mentioned in the minutes or reports.

In several of the minutes it is stated that a student named Hannah Baird has conducted some research on campervans on Harris. The results of this are, for unknown reasons, not available. The fact that the NHT facilitates this shows that they are interested in new insights into the trust and everything that comes with it. This can be linked to three criteria and one method of evaluation, for example to that the trust wants the local infrastructure to be well maintained. Campervans make use of the infrastructure of the estate. Apart from that, this could also be linked with the criterion that the trust wants sufficient visitors coming to the estate, or that visitors should respect the landscape. The fact

28 that the trust facilitates research like this also shows that it is one of the methods they use to evaluate themselves and the tourism on the estate: when made available, make use of research that could be used to reflect upon the daily affairs on the estate.

Minutes of annual general meeting of the North Harris Trust – Monday 20th of February 201715

This report is one of a short meeting (7.30-8.20) in which not many tourism subjects are discussed. The only subjects relevant for this research are the subject of the Mountain Festival, the rental income going back into the community and the infrastructure for campervan waste disposal.

The Mountain Festival is a midweek event in which the organisations highlights the best of what Harris has to offer. It is an important source of visitors to the estate and thus of income. What is discussed about the 2017 festival is that the website is coming along well. There was a question about the possibility of advertisement of local accommodation providers on the website. The fact that this is discussed in the annual general meeting means that the promotion of this festival is important to the trust and a good way to reach visitors for local accommodation providers. A criterion for success of tourism on Harris (which the festival facilitates) is thus that the visitors can find accommodations easily: the online infrastructure for visitors needs to be easily accessible.

Besides the festival, the investment of income into the local community, by visitors spending money on the island, is also subject of discussion in this general meeting. This is an important criterion for the trust, while this was also part of the main aims and objectives on the website.

The infrastructure for campervan waste disposal is also of interest to the general meeting. Although the conclusion is that there is no budget for an extra waste disposal area, it is still an objective of the trust, which means that the functioning of this infrastructure is a criterion for the trust’s success. This is linked to the aim and objective that ‘local infrastructure and services need to be well managed and maintained’.

Concluding, in the minutes of 20-02-2017, the following criteria arose: (1) online infrastructure for visitors needs to be easily accessible; (2) income out of tourism needs to be reinvested into the community; and (3) local infrastructure and services need to be well maintained.

15 _{North Harris Trust. (2017, February). MINUTES OF ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF THE NORTH HARRIS} TRUST. https://www.north-harris.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/MINUTES-OF-ANNUAL-GENERAL-MEETING-Feb-17.pdf

29

North Harris Trust, Minute of meeting – 16-01-201716

In this meeting, the first thing that is discussed is how to arrange the payment of a campervan site. They decided to do this by asking visitors who use those sites to donate some money. This subject links to the infrastructure for visitors that needs to be well managed.

The reason that they arrange the payment this way was to not have to pay taxes over this income. This way all the earnings of this sight can go back into the trust and be used for maintaining the land and everything that comes with it. The local economy benefiting from visitors as much as possible was also one of the objectives the NHT presented on their website.

Apart from that, the instalment of temporary toilet facilities for visitors in the summer was also a subject of the meeting. This is another example of the fact that good infrastructure for visitors is important to the trust, which means the availability of such infrastructure is a criterion for success.

Next to the former, according to the owner of a chalet in North Harris, there have been some problems with visitors ignoring the emptying facilities for chemical toilets. This concern of the owner shows that also among the residents of the estate the local infrastructure for tourists is of value. Besides, the concern of this resident for the environment indicates the need for respect towards and regular maintenance of the nature of the estate among the community itself.

Thus, two criteria for evaluating CBET can be deduced from the minutes of 16-01-2017: (1) the proper maintenance of local infrastructure and services for visitors; and (2) the local community economically benefiting from tourism.

North Harris Trust, Minute of meeting – 02-05-201717

In this meeting there was a community consultation article in the local volunteer newspaper, the trust’s Facebook page and website were suggested as other places where it could be published. This consultation would be on future planning. The organisation of the trust consulting with the community on forward planning means that they meet the criterion of involving the community as much as possible and it is a method to find out what the community thinks about the plans of the trust and how they want to see the trust going forward. Thus, the community consultation is both a criterion and a method for assessing the organisation.

16_{North Harris Trust (2017, January). Minute of Meeting.} https://www.north-harris.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Minute-16th-Jan-2017.pdf

17_{North Harris Trust (2017, May). Minute of Meeting.} https://www.north-harris.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Minute-2-May-17.pdf