Kenya is a leading tourism destination in Sub-Saharan Africa, attracting approximately 6% of the international tourism arrivals to the continent annually. This industry is, thus, a major economic pillar driving the country's Vision 2030 Development Plan to achieve middle-income status by that year. The Maasia Mara National Reserve (MNNR) receives the largest number of tourism visitors each year to Kenya. Many communities in the Maasai Mara have selcted sustaniable tourism as a means to improve the livelihoods of their residents based on the assumption that they will benfit from increasded visitation to the MMNR. Honey (2008) however pointed out that this assumption is false in many situations. Thus many questions concerning the contributions to local communities remain. One aspect that has receievd very little research attention in the context of sustainable tourism development relates to leadership. Three studies were used to address the lack of understanding of the role of leadership in sustiable tourism debelopment.;The first study guided by Leader-member Exchange (LMX) theory sought to investigate research question from paper 1 here. A paper and pencil survey was used to obtain quantitative data from 233 respondents selected from tourism-related organizations using a combined random and convenient sampling strategy. Partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the data. The results identifying three (Team and Performance-Oriented, Administrative and Socially Skilled, and Self-Protective) types of leadership.;Stakeholder theory was used to guide the second study.This study reported the findings of face-to-face interviews which explored the complex issues which stakeholders perceived to impact sustainable tourism development in the Maasai Mara area of Narok County. Purposeful sampling was used to select 20 respondents for this study. Based on the frequency analysis using NVivo, six overarching themes were identified: (collaboration, communication, problems facing sustainable tourism, perceptions of benefit sharing, leadership challenges, and impacts of tourism). These themes were subsequently catgorized into 4 dominant issues perceived by stakeholders (leadership challenges, perceptions of benefit sharing, collaboration and communication, and sustainable tourism impacts).;Finally, a tourism Leadership Action Model was proposed based on the integrated and synthesiszed findings of the quantitative and qualitatives studies. NVivo was used to create a matrix coding query for the three types of leadership identified in first study and the four dominant issues identified in the second study.;The results suggested that Team and Performance-Oriented and Administrative and Socially Skilled types of leadership provided the collaboration and dialogue needed to effectively address the challenges to sustainable tourism development in the Maasai Mara area of Narok County, Kenya.;These three studies contributed to an understanding of leadership in sustainable tourism development. Specifically, Leader-Member Exchange and Stakeholer theories were used to guide the conceptualization of leadership in sustainable tourism development. The Leadership Action Model proposed in this research can be utilized by other emerging tourism based areas in Africa.
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