Accessing the Impenetrable: The Nature and Distribution of Tourism Benefits at a Ugandan National Park

Nature-based tourism is widely considered a conservation strategy because it can provide benefits for local people and thereby increase support for conservation and contribute to development. However, concerns have been raised over the uneven distribution of benefits. Here we use access analysis to investigate the distribution of tourism benefits at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, and the underlying factors constraining access to benefits. We introduce two new categories of engagement in tourism: active (for example through employment) and passive (for example through revenue sharing). Benefits from active engagement were often monetary, and access to them was often tightly constrained. In contrast, benefits from passive engagement were often nonmonetary and were more widely accessible. By analyzing together multiple active and passive pathways to tourism engagement, the study reveals that tourism benefits in some form can reach a wide range of local people, even where access to individual pathways is tightly constrained.