Abstract

Globally, human activities are under pressure to strive towards sustainability. This movement towards greater sustainability is influencing all aspects of our lives on a daily basis including our holiday and travel decisions. This paper presents a portion of the results and findings of a larger study which applied a series of sustainability indicators to a number of community-based tourism ventures across southern Africa. An evaluation framework was constructed making use of a number of sustainability issues and their associated indicators to measure the sustainability of six community-based ecotourism ventures across southern Africa. The evaluation framework was tested for its applicability to investigate the social, economic and environmental sustainability of the six case studies. The utility of the constructed evaluation framework was subsequently commented on and changes recommended. A number of important lessons were leant during the application of the sustainability indicators to the investigated case studies. These lessons provide valuable insights and benefits for the subsequent application of the evaluation framework to future case studies. Besides providing valuable lessons for the application of sustainability indicators to rural base tourism ventures a number of important baselines for future benchmarking of sustainability performance also result from this study.

Key words: Sustainable tourism indicators, community-based ecotourism, Southern Africa.