Negotiating Development: Local Actors and Economic Change in Coastal Ecuador

Daniel Eric Bauer

In recent decades, coastal communities throughout Latin America have adopted ecotourism as an economic response to declining fisheries production. Based on research conducted in southern Manabí province, Ecuador, this paper focuses on the development of an actor-centered ecotourism cooperative as a concrete example of an actor-centered development project to complement mainstream, state-sponsored development. It specifically highlights certain difficulties encountered by a community cooperative to change from fishing and diving to ecotourism.

The Applied Anthropologist, No. 2, Vol. 27, 2007, pp 118 - 138

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