According to advocates, eco-certification can stem environmental damages from tourism in developing countries. Yet we know little about tourism operators’ economic incentives to get certified. To help fill that gap, we use detailed panel data to analyze the Blue Flag beach certification program in Costa Rica where nature-based tourism has caused significant environmental damage. We use new hotel investment to proxy for private benefits, and fixed effects and propensity score matching to control for self-selection bias.

In southern Africa, many early conservation efforts from the late 1800s and early 1900s either displaced local communities or restricted their access to natural resources. This naturally affected community attitudes towards protected areas and efforts were later made to rectify growing tensions. In the last few decades of the 20th century, these efforts led to conservation and ecotourism models that increasingly included communities in the decision-making and benefit-sharing process in order to garner their support.

Tourism in southern Africa is based on the region’s wildlife and nature assets and is generally environmentally sustainable, but the extent to which it contributes to other aspects of sustainable development — overall income generation or poverty eradication — is less well explored.

Eco-certification can generate private benefits for tourism operators in developing countries and therefore has the potential to improve their environmental performance.

Populations of the African penguin Spheniscus demersus have decreased dramatically over the past century, due in part to competition for food with commercial fisheries, and the species is now endangered as a result. Economic arguments are used to favour fisheries over the needs of penguins, but penguins have direct value to the South African economy thanks to penguin-based tourism at several breeding colonies.

Our findings provide some of the first evidence that eco-certification can generate private benefits for tourism operators in developing countries and therefore has the potential to improve their environmental performance.

Community-based natural resource management is frequently proposed as a solution to poverty in rural Africa. The extent of Namibia's CBNRM programme's success in terms of joint ventures between the private sector and communities has not been comprehensively analysed.

Increasing populations, together with the impact of climate change, are resulting in greater competition for land and a necessity for sustainable land use. Tourism can provide a flow of benefits from conservation to rural communities to reduce poverty and promote biodiversity conservation. Three key mechanisms of sustainable tourism to reduce poverty are discussed:  employment, value chains and equity. These are based on primary data and a thorough literature review.

The study assesses the role played by high-end ecotourism at study sites in Malawi, Botswana and Namibia.

Analysis of dependency ratios, household income and social welfare impacts in the study indicate that rural communities are moving towards a heavier reliance on the market economy in the form of ecotourism operations. Analysis of the impact of employment on an appreciation of conservation and tourism also shows a positive relationship, though education was shown to play an even greater role.

This is a chapter in the new publication "Sustainable Tourism & the Millennium Development Goals: Effecting Positive Change" by The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) which will be launched this year at TIES annual conference, the Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Conference (ESTC) being held in Monterey, California, USA from Sept 17-19, 2012.

Focusing on the key challenges and opportunities for sustainable development, the book, through case studies, best practice examples and industry insights, discusses tourism's roles in: