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In Sabah, Malaysia, illegal hunting has increased in recent years putting considerable pressure on large mammal populations. The causes for this phenomenon lie in increasing rural poverty, ineffective policies to regulate hunting, as well as a ready market for many wildlife products in the Chinese medicine markets. This paper examines how Community-Based Ecotourism has some potential to be used as a tool to reducing poaching using the Tidong community in Sabah as a case study. The key finding is that successful conservation outcomes for Community-Based Ecotourism projects are only sustainable over the long run if projects are structured to ensure that the local community is able to continue effective management once sponsoring organizations hand over control and that revenue from tourism does not decline. If tourist revenue declines communities may be forced to revert to previous practices reversing any initial conservation gains.

This paper aims to investigate the perceptions of indigenous people towards tourism development and the factors that influence their perceptions of the economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism.

This study will focus on the perceptions of an aboriginal group indigenous to Malaysia, and draws upon a sample of 272 from the Lower Kinabatangan region of Sabah, Malaysia. Respondents were administered a questionnaire, the results of which were analysed by way of partial least squares–structural equation modelling.

The results indicate a significant positive effect for economic gain on the perceived economic and environmental impacts of tourism, and of community involvement on the perception of social impacts. Moreover, the study found that the perception of environmental impacts, followed by perceived economic impacts, had a strong effect on support for tourism development.

This study makes a significant theoretical contribution to the resident perception literature by investigating how the perception of tourism impacts affects indigenous residents’ support for tourism development. Furthermore, this study describes a number of practical implications of this study for the promotion of sustainable tourism development among indigenous residents.