Tagal Ecotourism and Empowerment for Local Community: Case Study of Tagal Ecotourism Tinopikon Park, Notoruss Penampang, Sabah

This study addresses tagal as an ecotourism product that is uniquely for Sabah. It is a community based ecotourism venture that is influenced by the Dusun ethic’s traditional law. The traditional principle of tagal is focuses primarily on individual exploitation of riverine resources and it was later transformed into a community enterprise of tagal ecotourism. The Department of Fisheries Sabah (DoFS) together with the local communities joined effort to create a ‘smart partnership system’, an instrument that was not only to help revived the river fish stock but it had also led to the birth of tagal ecotourism product. There were 536 tagal sites sanctioned by Department Fisheries Sabah in 2015 and most of these tagal sites were transformed into community based tagal ecotourism sites. Tagal ecotourism helped to generate income through jobs creation and has uplifted the local’s economic level. The objective of this study is to explore the process and outcome of empowerment particularly to the tagal local community of ecotourism Tinopikon Park, Notoruss Penampang, Sabah, Malaysia. The methodology approaches used is qualitative where interview is chosen as the data collection method and thematic clustering as data analysis. The study suggested that there are strong favourable result of empowerment on the process and outcome at the research site