Abstract
For over twenty years, tourism researchers have examined how to determine whether destination communities are being empowered through tourism: there is much we can learn through analysis of that work. We outline and critique the most commonly used empowerment framework in this field as was first published by Scheyvens in 1999, which has four dimensions (psychological, social, economic and political) but which has been adapted and extended in a variety of ways. We also consider two other frameworks, and the application of a revised model in the South African context, before proposing that the Scheyvens framework would be strengthened through the addition of environmental and cultural dimensions. We draw theoretical inspiration from nested circle approaches to sustainable development to embed the dimensions of community empowerment within a series of ‘enabling factors’ that might support possibilities for community empowerment to occur, and, in turn, the empowerment dimensions and enabling factors are situated within a wider circle of the natural environment. We have structured this all into a new Empowerment and Sustainable Development Framework.
Highlights
In the global development field, empowerment [1] has become a ubiquitous term in the last few decades, used by governments, donors, development banks, NGOs, and corporate actors alike, often in conjunction with discussions of participation, communities, gender, and wellbeing [2,3,4]
Empowerment has become a firm part of the lexicon of scholars concerned with how tourism might “work for development” [36]
This article endorses the work of multiple researchers who have employed various empowerment frameworks in their studies in recent years
Summary
In the global development field, empowerment [1] has become a ubiquitous term in the last few decades, used by governments, donors, development banks, NGOs, and corporate actors alike, often in conjunction with discussions of participation, communities, gender, and wellbeing [2,3,4]. The discussion below draws from a narrative review of the tourism and empowerment literature focusing o: theories of power, extant conceptual models of empowerment through tourism, elements and indicators of empowerment therein, methodological approaches, and distribution across geographies and forms of tourism. We outline and critique the most commonly used empowerment framework in this field [1], which has four dimensions (psychological, social, economic and political) but has been adapted and extended in a variety of ways. We draw from nested circle approaches to sustainable development to embed the dimensions of community empowerment within a series of ‘enabling factors’ that might make, or break, possibilities for community empowerment to occur. The aim of this article is to provide a new framework for the analysis of community empowerment in the field of tourism studies, and to align that framework with thinking on sustainable forms of development. Before launching into a discussion of empowerment frameworks, we probe the meanings of power and empowerment
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