Tourism, social representations and empowerment of rural communities at Langue de Barbarie National Park, Senegal

Abstract

Evidence of tourism as a strategy to empower local communities around national parks remains elusive. Scholars argue that a prerequisite to empowering community members is to decipher their ideas, beliefs and perceptions. Social representations (SR) theory provides a framework to engage in such a task yet very few studies have taken on such analysis. The paper presents a study of the SR across 10 communities surrounding the Langue de Barbarie National Park in Senegal using survey and interview data. Specifically, we examine their representations towards tourism and the park as a basis to better inform their empowerment process. We conducted a cluster analysis, grouping community members responses into polemical, emancipated, and hegemonic representations. Most participants held polemical representations and perceived tourism and the park as a continuity of colonialism. Others with emancipated representations advocated for alternative tourism structures. The hegemonic representations on the other hand assessed tourism based on the direct impact it provides to individual members of their communities. For each cluster, we propose a form of empowerment that is better aligned with their social representations as a catalyst for their capacity to carve a meaningful space in tourism.