Facilitating collaboration and community participation in tourism development: The case of South-Eastern Nigeria

Collaboration and community participation are crucial for securing sustainable tourism and highlight the need to listen and respond to the broad range of stakeholders' voices, opinions, and concerns. These concepts dominated the discourse of sustainable-responsible tourism and gave rise to collaboration theory as well as various types of community participation. Many scholars in both Western and emerging economies have employed these concepts; however, there is limited research on how they apply in the Nigerian tourism industry. Therefore, this exploratory research discusses collaboration and community participation in tourism development in Nigeria, using the Southeastern region as a case study. In this area, tourism is in the early phase of growth. The paper reports on interviews and focus group discussions used to interact with tourism stakeholders in the region (traditional rulers, men, women, and youth representatives, chief priests, security agents, and tourism officials). Results showed that while the stakeholders are willing to collaborate, challenges affecting their efforts include autocratic governance structures leading to mistrust, clash of responsibilities, inadequate funding for security, lack of tourism awareness and little respect for local culture. The paper concludes that to develop a resident-friendly tourism destination and sustain collaboration and community participation, stakeholders require education about tourism and opportunities to participate in planning.