| Tourism is a massive and expanding global phenomenon that is creating new opportunities ans risks within destination areas. Besides tourism's macro-economic significance, tourists' activities also impact upon a wide range of businesses, supporting many people's occupations and incomes to varying degrees. Also, there are impacts on social, cultural, and physical environments. Responding to alternative development strategies, tourism has become an essential part of national and regional strategies to spur economic development and progress. Despite all these virtues of tourism, little attention seems to have been paid to the system dynamics of tourism development and sustenance at the micro regional level in Kenya. The gap between the inductrial and less developed countries continues to widen as a result of the technological chasm sperating them. Tourism provides a viable opportunity for developing countries to embrace quaternary economic activities in an effort to diversify and internationalise their economies. Quaternary economic activities are touted as a possible panacea to the development handicaps confronting the less developed countries. Therein lies the basic research questions; first, can a rural community successfully change from being preoccupied with primary to quaternary economic activities? Second, is tourism a viable option for catalysing economic growth and development in rural Kenya? Third, how can the erratic, dynamic and multi-faceted tourism industry contribute towards sustainable development in rural Kenya? Recent developments in theory consider chaotic fluctuations of a dynamic system as a highly desirable behaviour fluctuations allow the system to be easily controlled. The existence of chaos in societal settings makes the topic of importance in regional tourism analyses. Applying the chaos control theory to real systems can isolate the amount of noise involved in the estimation of system parameters and determine the required in the control parameters. The theoretical possibility of obtaining these estimations provides opportunities for using these techniques in regional tourism analysis and management. Such an approach should easily itself to the analysis of Kenya's complex and multi-faceted regional tourism systems. the overall objective of the study is to investigate the efficacy and relevance of McKercher's chaos model of tourism. The following objectives are thus derived in order to achieve this goal, namely to: 1. discern the functional structure of the Baringo-Bogoria destination area's tourism system. 2. derive a model of a rural-based regional tourism system, 3. suggest alternative approaches to rural tourism management in Kenya, 4. propose a scheme for enhancing the functional integrity of a regional tourism system, 5. consider the role of tourism in alleviating rural poverty, and 6. conceptualise the case for sustainable tourism development in rural Kenya. |
