Peace Parks, Mountain Communities and Tourism

I was honoured recently by a request from the Balkan Peace Park Project, a charity with which I have had some dealings in recent years, to be the key note speaker at their AGM which was held in London last weekend. My brief was, well, brief. "Talk about something relevant", I was told.

Fortunately, many years ago and in a prescient bout of literary high-mindedness, I had bought a copy of  Kadare's 'Broken April', a novel set in Albania and that has many evocative descriptions of the way of life in mountain communities in that part of the Balkans in the middle of the last century. From there it was a short stretch of my imagination to pick out some relevant passages from Roger Hutchinson's 2006 book 'Calum's Road', which tells the story of one man's endeavours to construct a road to connect his remote croft with a metalled road some miles away on the small Scottish island of Raasay.

Reading both of those books reminded me of the struggles faced by rural communities and of the ways in which individuals and groups can overcome many of these challenges where they can see a resulting benefit. And that in turn took me to Village Ways, an amazing initiative that was set up to support a handful of communities on the periphery of India's Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary in their efforts to develop responsible hiking tourism.  Funded partly by a UK philanthropist but run very much on business grounds, the company now operated in several locations across India as well as elsewhere in the world.

In each case, the principles are the same - the community dictates how much tourism can happen, where tourists can walk when around the village and what the nature of any face to face engagement should be. Teams from every participating village provide trained guides, porters, cooks and cleaners. Hikers stay in purpose-built guest houses that are basic but comfortable, and walk from village to village through stunning scenery. All stakeholders in each community receive a small financial benefit from every bed night sold in their village, with some of the receipts being distributed to individuals and families, and the rest collectively for the benefit of the village (one community we visited had spent its money on an electric fence to keep boar and deer out of their crops).

So my talk focused on the Village Ways experience as a template for what could be achieved in the mountainous areas on the borders of Albania, Kosova and Montenegro where the B3p project is working. I hope that by sharing a success story from another continent, I was able to help the Trustees, officers and members of the Balkans Peace Park Project with some guidance on how they could begin to build on the capacity building work they've been doing in recent years.

For more information on these two great initiates, see:

www.villageways.com

www.balkanpeacepark.org