ABSTRACT
For decades, tourism has emphasised sustainability to ensure all stakeholders’ benefits and well-being. In addition, the rising concerns about over-developed tourism and the negative impacts on local communities has prominently increased research interest from many stakeholders in tourism industry. Similar to sustainable tourism, community-based tourism (CBT) directly relates to social, cultural, environmental and economic impacts of the local community. Although there is a considerable amount of studies regarding sustainable tourism and CBT, the assessment of how they plan and manage sustainable community-based tourism (SCBT) is limited to some areas only. To date, there is indecisive implementation on the standard of SCBT development. This study, therefore, aims to address this knowledge gap. Two established CBT sites in Thailand were selected as part of a comparative study assessing SCBT development. Based on the Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria (GSTC), this study applies the Criteria for Thailand’s Community-Based Tourism Development (CBT Thailand) and Social Exchange Theory (SET) to assess and explain various stakeholders’ perspectives. A total of 40 stakeholders from selected tourism sites were collected and critically analysed using the Nvivo programme. Implications of this paper include the recognition of the standard criteria used for assessing SCBT development to ensure and enhance local community benefits and the usefulness of SET in explaining each stakeholder’s perspective on SCBT. This paper will assist tourism-related government bodies, agencies and businesses in CBT development and guide tourism industry practices. It also demonstrates the usefulness of using standard criteria to assess SCBT development in order to enhance the cooperation between the tourism industry and local community, which consequently resulted in creating mutual benefits among all stakeholders. This study is limited to two local CBT sites in Thailand. Therefore, the results cannot be generalised to other destinations due to the uniqueness of each destination.
