Background:

As the ?National Strategy for Ecotourism Development ? Phase 1? has already been drafted by the relevant government organizations, there is an urgent need for introducing sustainable community-based ecotourism projects as models for ecotourism development especially in rural areas of Iran.

Without such models for participatory planning and management, ecotourism projects risk to have negative impacts both on the natural and socio-cultural environments.

This project aims to extract the lessons learned of various SGP ecotourism pilot projects which are already using a community-based approach in different ecosystem types (coastal, mountain, forest, desert, and wetland), to propose a model for community-based ecotourism development in Iran.


The main activities and outcomes of the project will be:

• Enhance the existing network of ecotourism projects within SGP (clustering)
  
• Provide technical advice to the above projects
  
• Build capacity of a core group of stakeholders in development of community-based ecotourism (through technical workshops)
  
• Produce advocacy materials for the ?Ecotourism Cluster? such as film and booklet
  
• Provide policy inputs to the National Strategy Document (Phase 2)