Information and Empowerment: The Keys to Achieving Sustainable Tourism

By S. Cole. 2006

529 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sustainable tourism is a sub-branch of sustainable development that was put on the world agenda with the publication of the Bruntland report. The report focused on environmental issues and the natural environment has remained a central theme. Sociocultural issues have been overshadowed or marginalised. Community participation, although considered essential in sustainable tourism, is a concept subject to much interpretation. Based on longitudinal action research this case study, from Eastern Indonesia, provides theoretical coverage and practical ideas of how community participation can be moved from the passive, rhetorical end of the participation scale towards empowerment. Tourism has the potential to empower communities and the sustainable tourism agenda needs to focus on how to bring this about. As the case study illustrates, understanding tourists and tourism processes is the first stage to empowering the local community to make informed and appropriate decisions about their tourism development. Considerable investments are required in communication and trust building between the actors in tourism. This paper examines how action research, focus groups and the creation of a tourism forum can be concrete, first steps towards achieving sustainable tourism development in the 21st century.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae60b55ab43319dbf384853c5f4c7a20654491e3

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Citations in the corpus

A political ecology of water equity and tourism. A Case Study From Bali. (2012, methodology): “The methods had been used previously in Indonesia with considerable success (Cole, 2006).”
Tourism and poverty reduction: theory and practice in less economically developed countries (2012, background): “Although there is an assumption that all parties have an equal opportunity to participate in the CBT planning process, Jamal and Getz (1995) indicate that power imbalances pose a barrier to this ideal.”
Development for whom? Social justice and the business of ecotourism (2010, background): “During her research in Flores Island, Cole ( 2006b , p.”
Empowerment and resident support for tourism in rural Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): the case of Pomerania, Poland (2017, background): “The political dimension of empowerment is the most commonly studied aspect within tourism studies (Cole, 2006; Moswete & Lacey, 2014; Nunkoo & Ramkissoon, 2012; Strzelecka, 2015; Strzelecka & Wicks, 2015).”
Antecedents and Outcomes of Resident Empowerment through Tourism (2021, unknown): “…Stewart 2002; T. H. Lee 2013; Palmer, Koenig-Lewis, and Jones 2013), participation (Li 2006; Simmons 1994; Tosun 2006), knowledge and information (Cole 2006b; Joo et al.et al. 2020), and the power to influence the decision-making process (Boley et al. 2014; Nunkoo and Ramkissoon 2011, 2012;…”
Indigenous ecotourism in the Mayan rainforest of Palenque: empowerment issues in sustainable development (2014, background): “In a study of communities in Indonesia, Cole (2006) noted that the process of empowerment relies on transferring knowledge to the community and found that many of the communities that had failed to derive economic benefit from ecotourism were passive participants. Conversely, communities that were a”
Influence of place-based senses of distinctiveness, continuity, self-esteem and self-efficacy on residents' attitudes toward tourism (2015, background): “Cole (2006) indicated that resident empowerment represents “the top end of the participation ladder where members of a community are active agents of change and they have the ability to find solutions to their problems, make decisions, implement actions and evaluate their solutions” (p.631).”
Community-Based Tourism in Developing Countries: A Framework for Policy Evaluation (2019, background): “Therefore, for communities to develop CBT a shift in balance between the powerful and the powerless is required [21], not only in terms of economic, psychological, and social power but also political power to drive CBT implementation [15,27] and influence public policy to support meaningful communit”