Abstract
Despite the rich geological heritage encompassed within the Kruger National Park (KNP), the unemployment rate and poverty levels remain high for local communities abutting the northern part of the park. This study focused on the northern part of the KNP because no study has been conducted to identify and locate geoheritage sites and due to high unemployment rates and poverty levels in that area compared to the southern part of the park. The primary purpose of this research was to investigate and evaluate the potential for geotourism to contribute towards social sustainability and more effective local community development. Geotourism is an emerging re- search field and South Africa holds some fascinating geological heritage; however, geotourism has been under researched. Therefore, it was important to examine the potential for geotourism to effectively contribute towards local development. Consid- ering that the national government of South Africa through the National Development Plan (NDP) and National Tourism Sector Strategy (NTSS) recognises tourism as one of the growth pillars for poverty alleviation and job creation, geotourism can contribute towards this as one of the potential solutions. Social sustainability and stakeholder framework theories linked to the concept of sustainable development allowed examination of geotourism and its potential contribution to local sustainable development in the context of this study. This study used a four phased mixed re- search methodology (qualitative and quantitative) to investigate the potential for geotourism development as a secondary market to supplement the current tourism market (wildlife viewing) and to examine the geotourism potentiality to assist in ad- dressing unemployment and poverty. The first phase was a database inventory development, field ranking, evaluation and prioritisation of geoheritage sites using six indicators (geotourism value, cultural value, ecological sensitivity, accessibility, development requirements, and currently available academic literature) of 15 potential geoheritage sites. The collected field data was converted into Microsoft word and excel documents for analysis. Further- more, excel data with geographic information and values of the six indicators of 15 geoheritage sites was imported into GIS software in order to produce evaluation and prioritisation maps...
Ph.D. (Tourism and Hospitality)