Sustainable practices of community tourism planning: lessons from a remote community

Abstract

This article examines community tourism planning practices through the theoretical framework of deliberative democracy, and provides an example of best practices of integrating tourism planning and development into community comprehensive planning. It illustrates how a small remote community on Vancouver Island, Canada embraced practices of participatory dialogic planning in its official community planning process. Having faced a threat of tourism development going out of control, this community decided to take a proactive stance and collectively design a policy framework to guide potential developers. Fresh and innovative planning and policy approaches not only helped safeguard community and social capitals, but exemplified fresh unconventional practices of embedding community based tourism planning into broader sustainable community planning efforts.