Community Behavior and Sustainable Rural Tourism Development

Abstract

Community-based action as a positive impact of tourism development is examined and connected to a community’s capacity to protect itself from outside threats by negotiating the quality of tourism development. Five communities in Jeju Island, South Korea, are studied through interviews with community members and analysis of a regional newspaper archive. Tourism development is depicted as an interaction between outside developers and local residents that ultimately builds a sustainable dialogue for growth of tourism. In five communities, the partnerships established between local community residents and outside tourism developers began with initial resistance from residents and led to the following sequence of behavior: town meetings, formal organization of residents, petitioning, public demonstration, and legal action. By examining collective action narratives in the five study communities, a framework for sustainable rural tourism development is built to understand relationships between tourism impacts and community identity.