The complexities of community-based tourism: how external forces influence the sustainability of bird watching tourism in the remote Arfak Mountains of West Papua

[Extract] The largest and highest tropical island on earth, New Guinea, supports the third largest contiguous tract of old growth tropical rainforest wilderness after Amazonia and the Congo Forest. Its highly endemic avifauna comprises about 800 species of birds, more than the whole Australian continent, and includes the vast majority of the spectacular birds-of-paradise and bizarre mound nest-builders, as well as the world's largest pigeons and all three of the huge, flightless cassowary species. This high diversity is partly due to the island's mountainous terrain, supporting an unrivalled variety of ecosystems, from magnificent coastal mangroves and vast forested floodplains to dry savannahs and alpine grasslands. Less well known and accessible than Papua New Guinea in the east, the western (Indonesian) half, known as Papua, has higher mountains (to 4,650 metres above sea level), a smaller human population (2.2 million in 2000) and until recently less extensive exploitation of its forests. This chapter examines the idea of community-based tourism (CBT) as a mechanism for protecting forests through economic development. A case study community is investigated to identify how CBT is operationalised in a remote locale. The case study centres upon a community in the remote Arfak Mountains in West Papua to highlight the role that governance structures such as land use planning and the property system has upon forest conservation through economic development (see Chapters 14 and 15 of this book for further case studies on tourism development in remote areas of PNG)