Abstract
Rural community tourism initiatives in developed nations share most positive and negative characteristics with community-based tourism (CBT) initiatives in developing nations. They also share many barriers and conditions for tourism development. What makes them different is the context in which they operate. This paper identifies the main conditions that explain these differences through a review of findings from 103 location-specific case studies and other available literature that provides empirical evidence. The paper also explores the usage of the concepts of CBT and rural tourism. The findings are discussed under seven categories: Definitions, socioeconomic and cultural factors, policy and governance, land ownership, community cohesiveness, assimilation of external stakeholders, and type of visitors. It is argued that it is the developing-/developed-nation context, and not objectively established criteria, which largely dictates authors’ narratives with corresponding takes on tourism development and subsequent recommendations. The paper engages in a discussion about case-study research, its weaknesses and tendencies, providing some recommendations on how to increase the contribution of case studies to knowledge, and calls for more research on externally assisted non-Indigenous community-tourism initiatives in developed nations.
Highlights
Community-based tourism (CBT) and other sub-branches of sustainable tourism centered in communities have been commonly applied as vehicles for rural development in peripheral areas
Throughout the years, a considerable number of guidelines and project reports have been published by various organizations to facilitate the successful implementation of community-based tourism (e.g., [2,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]), many of which were designed to support development of tourism through official development assistance (ODA)
This paper gathered the findings from 103 location-specific case studies that provide empirical evidence of the critical conditions that differentiate community tourism in developing and developed nations
Summary
Community-based tourism (CBT) and other sub-branches of sustainable tourism centered in communities have been commonly applied as vehicles for rural development in peripheral areas Their beginnings date back to the 1980s, when community-based tourism was believed to be an alternative for rural people in the South [1], and a viable instrument for poverty reduction, offering opportunities for conservation [2] and rural economic development [3]. The seven categories proposed in this paper are based on results of a content analysis of a smaller sample of case studies that identified 148 specific factors that facilitate and inhibit CBT in developing and developed nations (in press) Based on this extensive list of factors, seven categories were designed that encompass the key drivers behind these differences and provide some justification for differential treatment of CBT and rural tourism in developing and developed nations seen in the literature. Studies that encompassed entire small-scale destinations were considered in the review, while studies of rural tourism carried out on individual businesses were discarded
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