This edited collection focuses on tourism development, sustainability and local change in southern Africa. The book offers a range of both conceptual and applied perspectives that address various changes in southern African tourism and community development relations. The key drivers of change that include climate change and globalization form the context for the diverse and interesting set of case studies from the region. The main conceptual grounds of the book cover sustainability, sustainable development goals (SDGs), responsibility, vulnerability, adaptation, resilience, governance, local development and inclusive growth. In this book sustainability is seen as one of the most important issues currently facing the tourism sector, affecting all types and scales of tourism operations and environments in the region. Tourism is an increasingly important economy in the southern African region and the industry is creating changes for communities and environment while also facing major challenges caused by global trends and changes. The book offers a case study driven approach to sustainability needs of tourism development in local community contexts. The case study chapters are linked through the book’s focus on sustainable tourism and local community development. Through emphasizing the need to understand both global change and local contexts in sustainable tourism development, this book is a valuable resource for all those working in the field.

Since its first mention in the academic literature, ecotourism has been endorsed by NGOs and governments as the most environmentally sound and locally beneficial method of tourist development. Over the last thirty years sub-Saharan Africa has adopted ecotourism as the primary focus for tourism development; research into this has demonstrated mixed results. In this publication, we seek to explore the actual outcomes for African countries that have developed their tourism policy around the principals and values of ecotourism. The sheer scope and magnitude of the task means that a complete evaluation of ecotourism in Africa is impossible. Instead, included here are spot assessments of various aspects of ecotourism related to conservation, policy development, environment, governance, community and indigenous peoples in southern Africa. The studies cover a wide array of countries, including Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Though this is only the beginning of a needed long term evaluation of the positives and negatives of ecotourism, it provides a starting point from which to move forward. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ecotourism.

Indigenous peoples are an intrinsic part of countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Finland, USA, India, Russia and almost all parts of South America and Africa. A considerable amount of research has been done during the twentieth century mainly by anthropologists, sociologists and linguists in order to describe, and document their traditional life style for the protection and safeguarding of their established knowledge, skills, languages and beliefs. These communities are engaging and adapting rapidly to the changing circumstances partly caused by post modernisation and the process of globalization. These have led them to aspire to better living standards, as well as preserving their uniqueness, approaches to environment, close proximity to social structures and communities. For at least the last two decades, patterns of increased economic activity by indigenous peoples in many countries have been viewed to be significantly on the rise. Indigenous People and Economic Development reveals some of the characteristics of this economic activity, 'coloured' by the unique regard and philosophy of life that indigenous people around the world have. The successes, difficulties and obstacles to economic development, their solutions and innovative practices in business - all of these elements, based on research findings, are discussed in this book and offer an inside view of the dynamics of the indigenous societies which are evolving in a globalised and highly interconnected contemporary world.