Local economic linkages to community-based tourism in rural Costa Rica Bernardo Trejos 1 and Lan-Hung Nora Chiang 2 1 Department of Tropical Agriculture and International Cooperation, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Pingtung, Taiwan 2 Department of Geography, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Correspondence: Lan-Hung Nora Chiang (email: nora@ntu.edu.tw) This paper reports on the contribution of tourism to the wellbeing of rural residents through the development of economic linkages engaged by community-based tourism (CBT) in rural Costa Rica. In a qualitative case study of local economic linkages surrounding one such project in Chira Island, economic linkages were assessed at two levels: discourse and practice. The findings indicate that CBT does not involve the collective property of the community, but rather, the collective property of a group of community members organized in a formal association. As a result, a discourse on local economic linkages has been promoted by CBT support organizations in which hopes of wider benefits are placed on small linkages to services and products provided by local community members. However, a field survey suggested that the economic linkages generated by CBT in the community were sporadic and polyvalent and, furthermore, that the linkages with agriculture are negatively affected by scale and seasonality, resulting in leakages out of the community. These findings caution practitioners that CBT may only have small-scale positive impacts on the local economy. Keywords: Costa Rica, community-based tourism, economic linkages, nongovernmental organi- zations (NGOs), rural development, rural tourism Introduction: community-based tourism (CBT) as a development strategy The potential contribution of tourism to the wellbeing of rural communities in devel- oping countries such as Costa Rica involves the development of economic linkages (Telfer & Wall, 1996; Telfer, 2001; Mbaiwa, 2003). As with any other economic activity, the developmental impacts of tourism depend on the nature and interactions of tourism-related activities with both suppliers (backward linkages) and customers (forward linkages) in the provision of food, construction outputs, power supplies, transportation and so on (Ceballos-Lascurain, 1996). Nonetheless, in most developing countries, there are few links between tourism and local sectors of the economy (MacLellan et al., 2000), in particular the large informal economy that sustains liveli- hoods in rural and urban areas. Detracting from linkages is the problem of ‘leakages’ (Kontogeorgopoulos, 1998), or earnings spent outside of the local economy to cater to tourism in distant or peri-urban rural contexts, most notably on imports of food and drinks, of capital and technology, as well as advertising and additional government expenditure on tourism infrastructure. In some cases, the consumption habits and infrastructure ensuing can affect local lifestyles and livelihoods – for better or for worse – in ways that lead to additional imports (Gnosh et al., 2003). In order to maximize the benefits of tourism development for rural communities, ways must be found to increase the utilization of local food products and, where feasible, agriculture. In this respect, given their reliance on local food, numerous small tourism establishments may be more important than larger hotels or resorts (Telfer doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2009.00375.x Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30 (2009) 373–387 © 2009 The Authors Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd