Abstract
Community-based tourism (CBT) is flourishing in Thailand, partly credited to the active local participation and engagement-driven national policies that aim to stimulate effective uses of local resources and destination attributes for income-earning and sustainable socio-cultural and ecological development. Against this policy-grassroot synergistic backdrop and given the scare literature on the civil roles in CBT, this study examines the civil participation as an important social capitalization bridge to enable and thrust the community development and organization towards realizing CBT potentials while creating positive impacts on the economics, cultural, social and environmental domains of sustainability. In particular, a civil participation-driven social capitalization-enabled resilience cycle model, with a root taken to social capitalization structure of destination management that relates and integrates thestructural andrelational elements, and the cognitive goals, is proposed, as a key conceptual contribution to the extant literature of CBT and tourism, and is empirically supported by the neural network simulations and structural equation modeling (SEM) fitting. The samples were drawn from the agriculture- livelihood based communities who exploit community-based tourism (CBT) to supplement their earnings and help them develop socio-cultural and ecological attitudes and sustainability results. The SEM and the neural network results were well-aligned and cross-supportive, which manifests another domain of contribution in the methodological aspect in social sciences, tourism and hospitality disciplines. The resilience cycle model fit is dynamic in nature, and provides a base for the continuous development of the communities in sustainable manner
Highlights
Tourism has been proven as an important instrument for economic and socio-cultural development, which can be effectively driven by destination’s and its extended humansocial capital, and the participative governance systems (Fayos-Sola and Alvarez, 2014).As tourism industry shares a relatively large percentage of many nation’s GDP (World Economic Forum, 2019), it is often treated as a political opportunity and means, which embraces civil society’s participation as a key driving force in the tourism development process, partly attributable to making use of dialogue of people and opportunity for the development of mutual understanding of the people (Scott, 20212)in driving ahead to yield business outcomes
The significance of civil participation in tourism development has always been recognized in both practices and the academic fields (Lin and Simmons, 2017), which includes sensitizing to the grass-root voices as intellectual and practical sources for the dominant motivational forces, ideas, investments and supports.The inclusiveness of civil participation is emphasized in this study, which embraces the roles of the community members who are directly or indirectly involving with the community-based tourism (CBT) initiatives, the residents, the intellectually supporting mechanism of higher learning institutions, and the local government
A total of 176 community members participated in the survey, which covers numerous coffee- and tea- livelihood based communities who initiated community-based tourism (CBT) as complementary to their main coffee- and tea-crops
Summary
Tourism has been proven as an important instrument for economic and socio-cultural development, which can be effectively driven by destination’s and its extended humansocial capital, and the participative governance systems (Fayos-Sola and Alvarez, 2014).As tourism industry shares a relatively large percentage of many nation’s GDP (World Economic Forum, 2019), it is often treated as a political opportunity and means, which embraces civil society’s participation as a key driving force in the tourism development process, partly attributable to making use of dialogue of people and opportunity for the development of mutual understanding of the people (Scott, 20212)in driving ahead to yield business outcomes. The significance of civil participation in tourism development has always been recognized in both practices and the academic fields (Lin and Simmons, 2017), which includes sensitizing to the grass-root voices as intellectual and practical sources for the dominant motivational forces, ideas, investments and supports.The inclusiveness of civil participation is emphasized in this study, which embraces the roles of the community members who are directly or indirectly involving with the community-based tourism (CBT) initiatives, the residents, the intellectually supporting mechanism of higher learning institutions, and the local government These stakeholder participations become the necessary social capital or resources needed to enable and sustain agricultural livelihood, and important, to maintain the ecological health of the natural environment as fertile soil is the prerequisite for all the socio-cultural and economics happenings (Wondirad and Ewnetu, 2019). As these sustainability achievements are inseparable from where the communities live their life, these sustainability resources are termed as livelihood assets (Colombo, Romeo, Mattarolo, Barbieri and Morazzo, 2018)
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