The dynamics of CBT are espedally illustrative given
its continued broad support by academics, development
agendes and others. Butcher (2007) describes how these
outside agencies exercise enormous power over partidpating
communities and exhibit almost neo-imperialistic behaviour
that makes support conditional upon adherence to a' small
is beautiful' mindset favoured by those agencies that
effectively frames the community as an antediluvian cultural
museum, regardless of what community members really
want. That these communities develop dependency on these
agencies and their ideologies is demonstrated by the
tendency of CBT initiatives to collapse once agency support
is withdrawn (Salafsky et al. 2001), given their susceptibility
to the same diseconomies of scale that plague the
performance of tourism SMEs (small and medium
enterprises) more generally (McKercher 1998). It is perhaps
partly in recognition of such scale-related limitations that
various forms of neo-alternative tourism, such as 'slow
tourism' (Conway and Timms 2010) and de-growthed
'steady state' tourism (Hal12009), have not yet gained traction
as widely embraced options, even though they appear, in
large part, as responses to the potentially apocalyptic effects
of climate change, which did not figure prominently in the
critiques that attended mass tourism starting in the late
1960s.