Abstract
Livelihood assets have a significant impact on the livelihood options and income of tourism communities. The level of tourism development and the type of natural tourism communities often exhibit spatial differences. By using the method of sustainable livelihood and examining the main factors that affect community income from the perspective of spatial heterogeneity, it is possible to identify the livelihood assets that play the most critical role in the development of sustainable livelihoods and income generation in the community, which helps provide more reasonable advice on tourism destination management. In this article, we conducted a case study on 16 communities in and around Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province, China, and divided the communities into three types, i.e., core attraction areas, service support areas, and secondary service support areas, according to the geographical and spatial characteristics, tourism development level, and livelihood type. The participatory assessment method was adopted to obtain in-depth interviews and questionnaire data from 256 rural households, which was utilized to construct four multivariate regression models to investigate the effect of livelihood assets on community income and the spatial difference of the factors that affect community income. The results showed that (1) livelihood assets exert a significant impact on community income in tourist areas, with a remarkable spatial difference; (2) the types of livelihoods and the effective utilization of livelihood assets have a significant impact on farmers’ incomes; (3) the type and amount of livelihood assets have a certain impact on the choice of livelihood; and (4) a farmer’s livelihood type determines the utilization method and the effective utilization of livelihood assets.
Highlights
IntroductionBecause tourism increases community employment opportunities [1,2,3], community income [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], and community livelihood assets [4] and reduces poverty [8,9,10], governments and non -governmental organizations such as China [11,12], Bhutan [13,14], and the UK Department for International Development [15,16,17,18] actively encourage communities to participate in tourism through policy support and project support
In past livelihood-related studies, communities and rural households were all categorized into different types; for example, rural households were categorized into three types, i.e., market-oriented quantized value, part-time quantized value, and non-farming household according to the livelihoods of the rural households [40]; project household and non-project household according to the types of the project [62]; and semi-mountain settlement, river valley settlement, high-mountain settlement, and resettlement area according to the geographical locations [38]; farm households and off-farm households according to the types of the livelihoods [41]
The results showed that human assets, physical assets, social assets, financial assets, and psychological assets had a significant positive impact on the income of rural households in the region, whereas natural assets and policy assets had a significant negative impact
Summary
Because tourism increases community employment opportunities [1,2,3], community income [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], and community livelihood assets [4] and reduces poverty [8,9,10], governments and non -governmental organizations such as China [11,12], Bhutan [13,14], and the UK Department for International Development [15,16,17,18] actively encourage communities to participate in tourism through policy support and project support. Determining which factors affect community income is key to solving the above problems and achieving sustainable community livelihood development
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