Civil Participation-Driven Social Capitalization-Enabled Resilience Cycle for Community-based Tourism

Abstract

Community-based tourism (CBT) is flourishing in Thailand, partly credited to the active local participation and engagement-driven national policies that aim to stimulate effective uses of local resources and destination attributes for income-earning and sustainable socio-cultural and ecological development. Against this policy-grassroot synergistic backdrop and given the scare literature on the civil roles in CBT, this study examines the civil participation as an important social capitalization bridge to enable and thrust the community development and organization towards realizing CBT potentials while creating positive impacts on the economics, cultural, social and environmental domains of sustainability. In particular, a civil participation-driven social capitalization-enabled resilience cycle model, with a root taken to social capitalization structure of destination management that relates and integrates thestructural andrelational elements, and the cognitive goals, is proposed, as a key conceptual contribution to the extant literature of CBT and tourism, and is empirically supported by the neural network simulations and structural equation modeling (SEM) fitting. The samples were drawn from the agriculture- livelihood based communities who exploit community-based tourism (CBT) to supplement their earnings and help them develop socio-cultural and ecological attitudes and sustainability results. The SEM and the neural network results were well-aligned and cross-supportive, which manifests another domain of contribution in the methodological aspect in social sciences, tourism and hospitality disciplines. The resilience cycle model fit is dynamic in nature, and provides a base for the continuous development of the communities in sustainable manner.