Tourism and community well-being: The case of the Maasai in Tanzania

• We focus on a bottom-up approach to understanding community well-being.
• Livestock, children and land resources were some of the attributes of well-being.
• Tourism negatively and positively affects identified well-being attributes.
• Tourism contribute to the elevation of women’s status.
• Dialogue between global and local definitions of well-being is necessary.

The World Tourism Organization (WTO) proposes tourism as a tool through which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) can be accomplished yet the goals have been criticized for their top-down conceptualization of well-being. Critics further argue that long-term improvements in the livability of indigenous communities require the MDGs to account for indigenous interpretations of well-being and development. This inquiry adopts a bottom-up approach to examine indigenous conceptions of well-being and to understand how tourism influences indigenous experiences of well-being. Informed by the body of work on community well-being, this study focuses on two Maasai communities, Esilalei and Oltukai, in Tanzania. The findings highlight the need for dialogue between the externally defined universal measures (i.e., MDGs) and localized conceptions of well-being.