ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the context and future of tourism in Africa’s national parks. The chapter is based on the proceedings of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) UNWTO’s 1st Pan-African Conference on ‘Sustainable Tourism Management in African National Parks in which the researcher participated in Tanzania in October 2012. Since then, no follow up conference on the sustainable development of these parks has been held in the continent to date. The participants and presenters at this conference were professionals and practitioners in the management of national parks across the continent. Both primary and secondary data was gathered to produce this chapter. Primary data was gathered through detailed note taking during presentations, panel and informal discussions with the presenters. A rating scale for three park tourism development models was also developed by the researcher and administered to the presenters as key informants. The Secondary data sources were gleaned from the presenters’ power point presentations and journal articles. Overall, this conference revealed that, tourism in Africa’s national parks was occurring amidst a plethora of key issues and challenges which threatened current and future tourism development in these areas. To address these challenges, three models aimed at enhancing tourism, conservation and community development for the park areas were proposed. For these models, the conference demonstrated that, the traditional ‘parks’ concept, with its people out mantra was rapidly losing popularity as a tourism and conservation strategy and consensus was that there was need to replace this design with a new design or designs centred, not on separation, but on mutual benefit and co-existence between wildlife and humans.
