Stewardship To Statute: Integrating Ecotourism in India Through Community Participation, Sustainable Governance, & Public Trust of natural resources.

Abstract

The study explores how far ecotourism initiatives in India proactively involving community participation, sustainable use of resources, and exchange of traditional ecological knowledge among communities, tourists, policy makers, and to future generation. Ecotourism can be integrated within enforceable legislation that guarantee sustainable ecological integrity, and conservation, resilience of natural resources, and equitable distribution of benefit across stakeholders. It tries to examine the constitutional, and institutional legal framework that convert customary conservation practices into statutory duties, ensuring that eco-tourism generates benefits sharing, balanced community livelihoods and future generational entitlement rights. Drawing on comparative legal analysis and applied socio-legal study, the study identifies governance model that recognizing environmental legal framework, public trust responsibilities, and collaborative governance with indigenous communities.

The study also try to evaluates India’s ecotourism mechanism for revenue sharing, enforceable visitor-limits, and local self-governance that have been embedded in legal frameworks to prevent commodification and ecological degradation, and further looking into the subsidiary measures such as statutory benefit-sharing mechanism, free, prior and informed consent for indigenous communities, independent monitoring and adaptive management clauses that allow regulatory reformations, penalties and remedies for non-compliance.

The anticipated outcome is a set of statutory insight and institutional reforms that integrate stewardship into statutory governance, strengthen grassroot collective involvement aligning with sustainable ecotourism governance and commitment toward future generations.