Rethinking the role and practice of destination community involvement in tourism planning

The concepts of community consultation and public participation are often included in discussions of planning in general, and tourism planning in particular. Within the tourism planning literature, however, this inclusion has mostly been limited to simple calls for some form of consultation to be an element of tourism planning, and in tourism planning practice these calls for community involvement have rarely been heeded. This lack of destination community involvement in tourism planning presents a serious challenge to improving the relationship between tourism and sustainability. It also reflects a major divergence between tourism planning and planning general, with considerably greater attention paid in general planning theory and practice to community involvement than in tourism. This chapter aims to revisit approaches to community involvement in tourism destination planning by identifying relevant trends and emerging themes from the broader planning literature. After critically reviewing these new approaches, the chapter will suggest ways to more effectively engage and empower destination communities in destination planning by connecting these general planning approaches to three streams of tourism research that the author has been involved in. The first is about building community capacity to undertake tourism planning, the second is the use of the concept of community well-being to drive tourism development and the third borrows from classical Greek Tragedy to argue for the use of advocates for marginalized groups. The chapter will conclude by proposing a destination community well-being framework for tourism planning, built around community involvement.