Community Based Tourism Activities within the Context of Sustainability of Tourism: A Case of Gelemiş Village

<div><div>Increasing awareness about reducing negative effects of tourism activities on environment and handing down a liveable world to the next generations have enabled the rapid development of nature based tourism activities for the last 20-25 years. Although protection of environment is very essential within the context of tourism sustainability, support and active participation of locals living in the areas where the tourism activities performed is also needed for achieving desired goals in sustainability. At this point Community Based Tourism (CBT) activities aiming to create more sustainable tourism industrydraw attention through focusing on tourism development and enabling sustainability with destination communities. CBT activities play a significant role due to its particular importance on locals’ ownership at tourism activities, enabling socio-cultural and economic development and protection of environment as well. CBT activities that have rapidly increased in countries like Canada, Nepal and Malaysia is also becoming widespread in Turkey. However much more sectoral and academic studies are needed to increase its growing rate. In this study, it is aimed to search current situation of CBT activities in Gelemiş Municipality of Antalya. Within this context, 15 semi-structured interviews have been conducted with local tourism entrepreneurs and some statistics have been obtained from Gelemiş headman. Data gathered from interviews has been evaluated under six categories such as rudiments of tourism sector, active participation in CBT initiatives, investment situation, local employment and local assets usage, government incentives, awareness of local community. Results of the study, clearly show that active participation in CBT management should be enhanced and increased, also the quantity of government incentives and supports should be increased, and a master tourism plan must be prepared that considers short-medium and long term CBT development strategies.</div></div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>"); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 29px 36px; height: 36px; width: 29px;"></div></div></div></div></div></div>