Tourism of Community Base as an Instrument for Local Development and Social Innovation: A Case Study in the Extreme Coast West of Ceará, Northeast Brazil

Introduction

To report on the development of tourism, especially community-based tourism, which occurs in the interior of the state of Ceará, it is necessary to understand how the reality of Community-based Tourism in Brazil and its genesis was constituted through historical facts, experiences and its heterogeneous character. To conceptualize it, it would not be a simple task to talk about it, without combining all the modalities in which it develops in Brazilian territory. The analysis of culture in traditional communities also depends on their social agents, whose identity is constituted in the history of their places and, therefore, strengthen the way in which tourism has become an activity full of signs, full of representations and social values. Maldonado (2009) conceptualizes community tourism as “[...] any form of business organization based on property and sustainable self-management of community heritage resources. The author also states that the activity must be “[...] in accordance with the practices of cooperation and equity in work and in the distribution of the benefits generated by the provision of tourist services”.

Thus, according to Maldonado (2009, p.29), “the distinctive feature of community tourism is its human and cultural dimension, that is to say anthropological, with the objective of encouraging dialogue between equals and intercultural encounters of quality with our visitors, from the perspective to know and learn with their respective ways of life”.

Coriolano (2009, p. 280) reinforces the idea of a strong human characteristic when presenting community tourism as a new axis where communities are part of a large network through the prominence among these “social subjects, some social movements, communities, organizers of travel, fair trade operators, solidarity economies, environmental organizations and NGOs, all committed to this task of finding other paths for development”.

The authors strengthen the idea that this modality is built collectively, thinking about the human dimension, a thought that was also shared when the definition brought up in Ricco (2012) about cultural tourism, in which tourism expresses as main attractive aspects of human culture. This, in turn, does not separate from the community, as culture is one of its main characteristics and there is no community tourism without the cultural representations and signs of the communities where it takes place.

Furtado (2012) still relates the role of the State and the importance of considering the collective in the implementation of policies when he points out that “[...] when implementing cultural policies, it is necessary that government officials have an acute perception of the historical moment, beyond what is essential: the collective will”.

Furtado expands the reference of culture as one of the bases of development, and the notion for cultural policies, joining the idea that such policies can only be developed with the protagonism of the populations and that a “[...] development policy must be put at the service of the cultural enrichment process” (1984, p.32).

The author, who presents the belief that growth and prosperity should be extended to all, understands development as a process of transformation of the world carried out by human beings with the intention of meeting their needs, leading to reflect on how the policies created in the Northeast, like PRODETUR-NE¹, it sees Community Based Tourism, in which both the community and visitors who come to enjoy the local wealth are related to the objective of growth and what actions to preserve the areas where Community Tourism takes place. Such policies confront this view, since, by promoting hotel mega-enterprises, they significantly alter the social dynamics of the places where they have been installed, producing irreparable social and environmental inflows. Within this perception, the State, agent of the policies that should lead to development, must also be the intervener in the conflicts generated with the production and transformation of spaces, between the community and large owners of the means of production of the tourist activity.

State action is registered to reduce regional inequalities, in a constant dynamism, aiming at increasing growth and deconcentrating the income from Tourism, through regionalization, interiorization and segmentation of the tourist activity, when at the federal level, public policies were implemented in the first decade of the 21st century, through the National Tourism Plan (NTP)², in the context of which goals were established that gave rise to the Tourism Regionalization Program (TRP)³.