TOURISM DEVELOPMENT THROUGH COMMUNITIES’ SUPPORT: RURAL COMMUNITIES’ PERSPECTIVE

Rural tourist destinations are a growing segment of global tourism. The rural communities in these destinations play a major role in delivering tourist services, attractions, and accommodation. Any tourism development, therefore, requires host community support if it is to attain long term success. The proposed study aims to investigate tourism development through communities’ support in the context of rural communities’ perspectives. The Social Exchange Theory was employed to develop the conceptual framework for this study. A total of 266 residents from sampled households at rural communities in a developing country were surveyed. The study employed the Partial Least-Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) analysis. The findings of this study revealed that the community’s participation in the decision-making of tourism matters has a significant influence on residents’ support for tourism development. Tourism stakeholders as well as rural host communities will benefit from these findings which will outline how community’s participation in tourism decision-making influence them to be supportive for tourism development. This study analyses the direct effect of host communities’ perceived positive and negative impacts of tourism, participation in tourism decision making towards support for tourism development, and perceived positive impacts towards community participation. A quantitative survey method was carried out to collect data for testing the significance of the proposed relationships in the conceptual framework of the study. The study recruited rural host communities at the Dhangmari village located in the district of Khulna in Bangladesh. Host communities’ perceived positive and negative impacts of tourism can influence them to support for tourism development in rural communities. Notably, community participation in tourism decision-making process has a greater role to enhance host communities’ support towards tourism development in rural communities as it assists to alleviate their confusion and conflict on such a development, particularly, in developing countries. This study further explored an indirect effect of community participation in tourism decision making between host communities’ positive impacts of tourism and support for tourism development. Thus, local authorities should provide more opportunities for host communities to be involved both in tourism operations and decision-making process.