Exploring the role of nested institutions in community-based tourism development: Two case studies from China’s Tibetan pastoral region

Abstract

Community-based tourism is key to rural sustainable development. However, information remains inadequate on how natural resource management institutions restructure community social capital and property rights regimes while developing community cooperation and tourism participation within evolving rural socio-economic systems. This study investigates two rural villages, one under a household-based rangeland transfer system and the other under a community cooperative institution, to quantitatively assess how each mediates rights-based, structure-based, and network-based access mechanisms influencing community cooperation and tourism outcomes. The community cooperative institution facilitated higher rights-based and network-based access to tourism resources and markets for all community members, improving tourism participation and the equitable distribution of tourism benefits. This is because it uses hybrid and nested property rights provisions and social capital operating at different scales to protect individual rights and the balance of power. These practices restore social reciprocity, community redistribution, and market networks in building community cooperation, which better responds to the changing features of the rural socio-economic system. Therefore, social capital and property rights regimes are components of a nested community institution used to restructure social networks, rights, and entitlements. By these means, rural communities can devise different cooperative scales to govern their access to tourism resources and markets.