A community asks itself: do we want tourism?

As tourism saturates the Western Indian Ocean archipelago of Zanzibar, and investment increasingly shifts toward the few remaining remote beaches and islets, the absence of local voices in the affected communities is notable. Here we—a community organization—use citizen science to examine local attitudes toward tourism on Pemba where recent policy initiatives are multiplying rapidly. Through focus groups discussions we identify lost access to productive resources (fishing grounds, beaches and forests) and inappropriate managerial behavior as primary costs, and employment opportunities and hotel development projects as benefits, whereas individual interviews reveal concern with cultural loss and enthusiasm for small enterprise opportunities and new friendships. We leverage a comparison between the perception of tourism on Zanzibar generally and the experience of tourism locally to show how tourism, when viewed from a distance, is believed to bring infrastructural and employment benefits, but when experienced locally provides direct exposure to conflicts with hotel managers and investors. We also find that attitudes toward tourism are somewhat more negative than 18 years ago, with lost access to productive resources most currently salient. We elicit recommendations for tourists, hoteliers and the government, and examine how these align with recommendations in the gray literature.