Priorities, People and Preservation: Nature-based tourism at Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam

Priority given to environmental conservation has frequently been at cost to local communities, displaced from national parks to reduce the impacts of shifting subsistence agriculture (for example Buergin 2003; Schmidt-Soltau 2003). In turn, nature-based tourism has been encouraged in national parks. The hope has been that the economic benefits tourism is expected to bring will provide alternative livelihoods for relocated people, while being less environmentally destructive than traditional agricultural systems; this has been the case at Cuc Phuong National Park in northern Vietnam. This chapter explores the impacts of the nascent tourism industry at Cuc Phuong on the residents of nine villages, located within the park, or in resettlement villages in the buffer zone surrounding it, or in longer-established villages close to the park boundaries. Villagers' perspectives, alongside those of domestic and international visitors, provide understandings of the extent to which tourism has contributed to improved livelihoods, and of its wider social, economic and environmental consequences.