When you’re working with a community to create a project, how do you benefit all members and not just the economic/ social elite?  During this workshop we looked at a case study of community run tourism that took place in the village of Hodka, India.  The UN National Development Program and Government of India joined together to pilot a community-owned rural tourism venture in 36 villages throughout India, creating Endogenous Tourism Projects with a series of goals which included empowerment of women and the poor, creating a “better” class of sensitive tourists, and the investment of tourism profits back into villages through social development/ welfare projects and jobs.

In Hodka the social structure has a long history of subjugation of women and alternating supremacy by Hindu and Muslim factions.  Can this project be successful when the primary beneficiaries are those already in power?  While eventually the project created engagement throughout the community, it also created corruption, didn’t change the gender norms (women still sequestered, have no ownership/ leadership of the resort), and generally stayed under the power of the town council.  Yet this ETP is one of the most financially successful of the UNDP and is used as a model for replicable projects in the state of Gujarat.  How do we evaluate that success?  Could there have been better models of helping this village economically develop?  You can follow all the right ABCD tools, but still not necessarily the right steps in this particular village because of cultural issues and structural issues that interfered with the goals of the UNDP partnership and forced uncomfortable compromises.