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| COMMUNITY TOURISM OF DUANSHI VILLAGE: THE CONTRACT DOMINANT COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION AND ITS EMPOWERMENT PRACTICE |
| WANG Hua, LONG Hui, ZHENG Yan-fen |
| School of Management, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China |
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Abstract Based on case study of Duanshi Village in Danxia Mountain, Guangdong province, the paper aims at analyzing how non-minority, tourist attraction dependent rural communities achieve political, economic,psychological and social empowerment through contract-of-equality view based informal institution built from bottom up in the background of tourism development. It is found that in the case of Duanshi Village, it has gone through three periods of tourism participation, from individual involvement to the organizational involvement and lastly to the period of comprehensive involvement. Throughout the process, the village has constituted series of informal institutions based on the view of contract-of-equality, including democratic village governance system, the land rent and requisition system, and the interest allocation system. Abide by the concept of contract, local residents have autonomously implemented all these informal institutions and thus are able to effectively take control of and resolve external intervention and internal conflicts, which ensures local residents truly participate in the process of tourism decision-making, management, operation and interests allocation, and resultantly achieve political, economic, psychological and social empowerment of local residents. The paper also points out that self-empowerment of Duanshi Village is embedded in the outcome of actions in the dual (external and internal) institutional environment.Therefore, the paper in the end indicates that major problems the Duanshi Village currently faces in the process of sustainable tourism development lie in how to reform and perfect the existing institution to strengthen its functions of mandatory and sanction, as well as to constitute new institution aiming at promotion of social empowerment.
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Received: 04 August 2014
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2015, Vol. 30 
