Community Tourism in Ecuador: Towards a model of social development and sustainability.

The research project seeks to study interrelations, dependencies, determinations, of five key factors of community tourism in Ecuador, obtained in a first research on the subject (already completed) among the proponent entities. These factors: community organization, degree of appropriation of natural and cultural resources, market, external intervention and leadership, come into play to guarantee the sustainability or not of community tourist experiences. Knowing that the understanding of internal dynamics, how much of the tourist entrepreneurship environment is one of the key issues of tourism research, (with a view to a subsequent applicability in decision making), we intend to study these interrelations in depth in five specific areas: Ingopirca-Caguanapamba (Cañar Province), Shaglly (Province of Loja) Blanca-Salango (Manabí Province) and Zaruma (Province of El Oro). Based on both the case studies and the analytical framework that the team already has on the subject, a complex modeling of the factors that positively and negatively condition the successful implementation of community tourism will be proposed, which we aspire will serve as a reference and diagnostic instrument for interventions and development planning of this tourism sector. The integral nature of community tourism, with implications both in environmental management, and in inter -ethnic relations and the generation of endogenous development through a community and social model, make this research project a commitment to integral knowledge about indigenous communities in the face of alternative development models, whose results could very well transcend its utility beyond the tourism sector itself, while contributing to one of the current challenges of the sector Which is local base tourism. Indeed, within the tourism the weight of local actors is crucial, both in favor or against this activity, since it is carried out in concrete destinations, that is, in territories. If in the case of Ecuador, important territories belong and are managed by the communities, the way in which they venture into tourism, based on more general visions over the territory and its resources, it is a very suggestive issue. The more than experiential models of communities, they offer interesting and more holistic perspectives of local development. For the above, we propose that one of the two transverse axes that will be worked on in this phase will be precisely: the contribution of the community to local tourism development. A second transverse axis of analysis that we propose is from the translation of tourism to the Andean logic and rationalities, and their analysis in their current dynamics. We assume the existence of a particularity and specificity of "the Andean", characterized first by a territory and a physical environment marked by the two chains of the Andes and the related spaces of their coasts and jungle, which constitute an immensely diverse whole. And then, for cultures and forms of social organization that combine an ancestral tradition and culture, with a dynamic participation in the contemporary, from other than western assessments and their own worldview. Understanding it is what also allows us to understand how they translate tourism into their rationality and structures.

6th UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PROJECT COMPETITION