UNESCO biosphere zoning, local management, and empowerment in community-based tourism: lessons from Guatemala

UNESCO Biosphere Reserve zoning forms a natural experiment to understand how territorial management and local tourism authority shape community empowerment outcomes. A mixed-methods study in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve novelly applied the community tourism empowerment framework to compare three gateway towns to the Reserve’s most visited national parks and how different extents of collective local authority across the biosphere’s zones affected the degree to which tourism empowers communities. Results suggest that stronger collective local authority in the multiple-use zone leads to greater overall empowerment. However, tradeoffs in empowerment dimensions and limits to local territorial authority challenge social and environmental empowerment. This work provides empirical evidence for how collective local authority over tourism shapes empowerment outcomes across UNESCO Biosphere zones and provides a framework to meaningfully compare community-based tourism enterprises.