Community-based ecotourism management moving towards sustainability, in Ventanilla, Oaxaca, Mexico

Community-based ecotourism is an option for rural development, but few cases have shown this to be sustainable. This paper assesses the sustainability of the Ventanilla community-based ecotourism management (CBEM) project, located in the South Pacific coast of Mexico. Families were surveyed with semi-structured and structured interviews, carried out in 1999 and 2000, respectively, in order to obtain the socio-demographic profile of the community, the natural resources and services exploited and the socio-economic relevance derived from the latter. The results obtained permitted identification of sustainable indicators such as, community cohesion, benefit sharing equity, commitment for conservation and management, within the political, social, economic and environmental context. The Ventanilla analysis is innovative in that it takes an integrated coastal management perspective for assessing CBEM using sustainable indicators.