Claudia Dolezal

Community-Based Tourism in Thailand: (Dis-)Illusions of Authenticity and the Necessity for Dynamic Concepts of Culture and Power.

Thailand is undoubtedly growing in popularity as a tourist destination and is advertised in multiple tourism brochures and travel guidebooks. Despite its exotic appeal, a large number of tourists decide to experience it from inside all-inclusive hotels and resorts with little contact with the local population. Nonetheless there are a growing number of individual travellers trying to discover the country’s treasures off the beaten track, equipped with backpack and camera on the search for ‘the untouched’. Research in tourism has shown that tourists increasingly demand ‘authentic’ experiences (Butcher, 2003, MacCannell, 1999, & Wang, 1999). Still, there is not only a shift in tourist expectations to a closer contact with locals, but also in terms of tourism development and planning (Mowforth & Munt, 2003). Neoliberal politics were at the forefront of an intrusion by multinational companies based in foreign, mostly developed, countries focusing on economic gain with high proportions of leakage and few

ABCD to CBT: asset-based community development's potential for community-based tourism

This article conceptualises the potential for a relationship between asset-based community development (ABCD) and community-based tourism (CBT), with a view to improving CBTs patchy record in delivering community development. ABCD has previously been used in international development and community work, but is new to tourism for development. Hence, the article seeks to relate ABCDs characteristics with CBT on a theoretical level, based on a shift away from ‘needs-driven’ development towards a conscious appreciation of community assets. The authors suggest that ABCD can, and should, be applied to CBT, given the positive emphasis it puts on people and their potential.

The Tourism Encounter in Community-Based Tourism in Northern Thailand: Empty Meeting Ground or Space for Change?

This article offers a contribution to the anthropology of tourism by investigating the tourism encounter in community-based tourism (CBT) in Northern Thailand. It does so by discussing MacCannell’s (1992) idea of the Empty Meeting Grounds and Said’s Orientalism (1978), two works that contributed to research on power inequalities between tourists and residents in the developing world. By establishing a relationship between the two and embedding these in the wider literature on the tourism encounter, this article suggests moving away from binaries towards understanding the space of the tourism encounter and its potential for change. Building on empirical research conducted in Ban Mae Kampong, a CBT village in Northern Thailand, findings suggest that CBT shows signs of resident-host interactions that are based on understanding and learning rather than exploitation. While also in CBT friendships and meaning take time to emerge and the ‘Other’ is used as attraction, villagers’ agency and control over tourism are acknowledged. This paper therefore calls for a revisiting of the theoretical grounding that influences our understanding of the tourism encounter and argues for an investigation of community power relations in connection to the tourism encounter and its potential for residents’ empowerment in CBT.

Community-Based Tourism in Bali: On the Road Towards Empowerment? An Interview with Djinaldi Gosana

Djinaldi Gosana, the chairman of the Bali Community-Based Tourism Association (CoBTA) and the Executive Director of Bali Hotels Association, seeks to empower communities in Bali’s rural areas through community-based tourism (CBT). Bali CoBTA is an NGO that engages with CBT in Bali’s least developed regions and strives to build stronger communities by assisting them in using, above all, their cultural assets to engage in a type of tourism that is financially beneficial for the community and at the same time helps preserve local culture. This interview was conducted on 2 June 2013 during the author’s PhD fieldwork on the topic of CBT and empowerment in Bali. Community empowerment is a highly contested concept that seems to be easily achieved in theory but difficult to implement in practice. Empowerment, along with the challenges that Bali CoBTA is facing, forms the focus of this interview.

The ASEAN Community-based Tourism Standards: Looking Beyond Certification

ABSTRACT This paper reports findings from an opportunity study on the appropriateness of implementing community-based tourism standards (CBTS) certification through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) criteria, as a way to improve sustainable tourism provision in the region. Framed by critical reflections on community-based tourism (CBT) literature and existing sustainable tourism standards (STS) practices, qualitative research consisting of interviews with six key industry experts provided core insights into a number of CBTS’ implementation challenges. Findings indicate the main hindering factors for the implementation of CBTS to be the lack of adequate governance, limited funding and insufficient community capacity. The study concluded that although at the moment the full implementation of CBTS as a certification programme would be premature, ASEAN-CBTS’ criteria are a useful benchmarking and strategic planning tool for local communities, which would eventually lead to improved CBT benefits, standards and performance in the region. At the same time, this paper argues that aspects including CBT competitiveness and service delivery need to be tackled first to create fruitful grounding for CBT certification.