The origins of this chapter go a few years back, when Roderick Buiskool and I decided to work it out for the important book Ecotourism impacts on indigenous peoples, edited by Wayne Babchuck and Robert Hitchcock. As usual, the chapter is open access on this website under Publications. The abstract:

This chapter contributes to the growing body of literature about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism. We describe how this shock became a structural stress for the indigenous Karo Batak of Batu Katak, adjacent to the Mount Leuser National Park (MLNP), Sumatra, Indonesia. Many Karo in Batu Katak are involved in market-based Community Based Ecotourism (CBE) to diversify their livelihoods, making ecotourism an important strategy supplementing mostly agricultural livelihood opportunities. However, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has led to an enormous reduction of the number of tourists globally, including in Batu Katak. Through our examination of the effects that the pandemic has had on ecotourism, and on the Karo of Batu Katak specifically, we investigate the vulnerability of ecotourism for indigenous groups as a sustainable livelihood diversification strategy. While CBE is often considered an important development mechanism that reduces marginalized groups’ vulnerability, we argue that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of CBE as a mechanism itself. This hasimportant implications for the future of global efforts to preserve biodiversity and empower indigenous people through tourism. Whereas ecotourism is often presented as an important livelihood diversification strategy to increase people’s social sustainability, a shock/stress like the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates that it is important to keep approaching it exactly like that, as a diversification, and not as the dominant, or even the only, strategy. However, due to various attractive benefits, ecotourism can tend to prevail as a livelihood strategy, increasing dependency on, and vulnerability through CBE for indigenous and other marginalized groups, as was disclosed in Batu Katak and its surroundings since the start of COVID-19.