Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a case study of Rwanda's hospitality sector development since 2000, revolving around high-end gorilla tourism. It explores the role of nature conservation in the country's tourism strategy and finds that economic demands do not always trump ecological needs.

Paper long abstract:

Based on Rwanda’s natural endowments (mountain gorillas and geographic location in the centre of Africa) and recently created features as a by-product of state-building and power consolidation (good reputation, high security, and cleanliness), for the last two decades, the country's government has put high efforts into creating a high-end eco-tourism sector from scratch. It invested a massive share of its scarce public resources and pooled further foreign and domestic funds to construct the needed infrastructure, including luxury hotels and lodges. While diversification towards conferences and other forms of tourism are showing some success, the sector's revenues rise and fall with gorilla visits. Covid-19 led to a sharp drop in tourists and income, and pre-pandemic levels may only be reached in 2024 or later. At the same time, the government has been lauded for its genuine and exemplary conservation efforts that led to a substantial growth of the mountain gorilla population. Most recently, the Volcanoes National Park's area (where gorillas reside) has been expanded by 23% with an even bigger additional buffer zone despite the country's overpopulation and precarious land scarcity. Based on interview evidence and secondary literature, the paper finds that trade-offs among competing economic interests as well as between economic and ecological demands have been settled by the political leadership in its idiosyncratic top-down governance mode, sometimes with long-term strategies in mind and sometimes in ad-hoc decisions, but overall in a fairly balanced way.