2 Finca Sonador, Costa Rica The Longo Maï movement, based in France, aims to give war refugees a positive and

Box 8.2 Finca Sonador, Costa Rica The Longo Maï movement, based in France, aims to give war refugees a positive and

productive home and work environment rather than a temporary and transient camp. In 1978 the movement helped a group of Nicaraguan refugees fleeing Somoza’s terror to form a small community in southern Costa Rica. After Somoza’s overthrow in 1979 they returned to Nicaragua but were soon replaced by Salvadoran refugees fleeing the same type of state terror.

NICARAGUA

CARIBBEAN

COSTA RICA

Limón San José

F PACIFIC OCEAN

F Finca Sonador

The community is now called Finca Sonador and has a population of around 300, mostly Salvadorans with a few Costa Rican campesino families, refugees from poverty and land- lessness in their own country. The Finca is a relatively self-sufficient agricultural village which produces coffee and a few other products for sale beyond the village. In low income months their traditional survival agriculture is based on corn, beans, rice and yucca.

few visitors. A few families are willing to accommodate visitors and have the space to

Since 1992, the Finca has attempted to diversify its economic activities by attracting a

do so, although in some cases visitors may find themselves sharing a room with children. Prices for meals and accommodation are negotiated with the family, although there is

a non-binding guidelist of tariffs. By the standard of the northern professionals who form the majority of visitors, prices are ridiculously low. Other activities offered in the village include horseriding, guided tours, involvement in farming and general inclusion in fiestas. These ensure that the tourist money is distributed further afield within the community. Advertising for the scheme is largely by word-of-mouth, although a publicity sheet is posted in the Quaker lodging house in San José.

The small scale of the scheme would seem to be an essential feature both for the tourist and the host. For the visitor it is important that the experience has its air of exclusivity in the sense that this is not the usual tourist experience. For the host, it earns a little extra income with little extra cost and does not disrupt the community’s or the family’s way of life.

Source: Mowforth (1996)

‘Hosts’ and destinations • 219

consultation and participation are still young in their development and suffer various shortcomings. It is debatable whether any of the relatively sophisticated techniques that have become available recently are able to improve on the traditional and well-used technique of the meeting. Local communities the world over traditionally use both formal and informal meetings to debate the courses of development and issues which may affect them. Of course meetings are not always all-inclusive; for example, women and chil- dren are excluded from many but by no means all such meetings.

More sophisticated survey techniques, public attitude surveys, stated preference tech- niques and contingent valuation methods all suffer the disadvantage of being conducted, administered, promoted and publicised by persons outside the local community affected by a tourism development. They are tools used by professionals administering the surveys on local communities, who by definition do not therefore enjoy control over it.

13111 Both inputs and results are often open to dispute. In terms of Pretty’s typology such techniques may help to improve the level of participation, but they are unlikely to attain

a high level unless they focus on the degree of decision-making devolved to the local community as well as its active involvement in the operation of the scheme. There is little doubt, however, that with their systemic and structured learning processes they can increase the likelihood of sustained success of schemes. A number of the examples given in this chapter illustrate this.

These techniques represent recent attempts to involve local people in research, policy appraisal and implementation themselves. But in reviewing the origins of participatory appraisal, Chambers (1994a, 1994b, 1994c) notes that rural appraisal techniques can be traced to the late 1970s and early 1980s as a reaction to the ‘biased perceptions derived from rural development tourism (the brief rural visit by the urban based professional) and the many defects and high costs of large-scale questionnaire surveys’ (1994b: 1253).

Accompanying the general fashion for ‘local participation’ discussed above, recent years have seen the development of a trend for participatory approaches to enquiry and research. Participatory action research (PAR), participatory research methodology (PRM), participatory rural appraisal (PRA), rapid appraisal (RA), rapid assessment procedures (RAP), rapid assessment techniques (RAT), rapid ethnographic assessment (REA), rapid rural appraisal (RRA) and a bewildering array of other acronyms and initials have entered into use. Although they are often formally stated to involve many steps in the process, essentially they all follow the three-step procedure of participatory enquiry, collective analysis and action in the locality. (For a more detailed outline of the general procedure, see the work of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).)

The principle of local participation underlies all these techniques, but they involve differing degrees of participation often in different stages of the appraisal, and the same technique may be interpreted and implemented in different ways by different people. A specific example is given in Box 8.3, which includes extracts from a 1996 advertise- ment (on the internet) for members of a team to conduct a PRA in Ecuador. While the request for support or assistance in this case came from the community, through the Ecuadorean NGO EcoCiencia, to Jon Kohl at Yale University, there is an implication that it is the ‘outside tecnicos’ and professionals who, out of largesse, will solve the problems of the local community. The leader has a clear preference for the establish- ment of an environmental interpretation centre, and it is uncertain whether the idea for this arose from within the community and/or is what the local people had in mind. Nevertheless, it is likely that this example would be classified as functional or inter- active participation by Pretty’s typology. A little more precision in the classification may be possible with more information regarding the number and kind of major

11111 decisions which were made before the process began to involve the local community.

220 • ‘Hosts’ and destinations