Ecotourism as a Sustainable Means of Development: Cases of the Indigenous Tao, Tsou and Atayal Tribes of Taiwan

65 pages. Presented to the Department of International Studies and EALL and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts November 2017Tourism has become an important livelihood option for many aboriginal communities around the world, as it not only provides an opportunity for economic development, but also cultural survival. More recently, many indigenous communities have turned to ecotourism as an alternative tourism model because of its promise to protect the environment and local culture. Indigenous tribes in Taiwan have used this model and are generally praised for adopting successful ecotourism industries. However, many ecotourism industries in Taiwan and around the world are either inefficient or not as sustainable as they claim to be. Furthermore, while there is an impressive amount of research done on the topic of indigenous ecotourism and sustainability, academic works have overlooked at least some aspect of the industry, whether it be indigenous perspectives, ecological changes, or economic development. The goal of this thesis, therefore, is to contextualize the so-called sustainability of these ecotourism industries within the objective and subjective experiences of these individual tribes, and to gain new insight into how communities can develop sustainably under the ecotourism model