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| COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF TOURISM INDUSTRY |
| HU Zhi-yi, ZHANG Zhao-gan |
| Department of Urban & Resources Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China |
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Abstract With the rapid development of tourism industry, people come across more problems, which lead to a reconsideration about the relationship between tourism and community. It is P. E. Murphy who applied firstly the concept of community involvement in tourism in 1985. From then on, many foreign researches put much attention on this issue to try to find out a new approach for the sustainable development of tourism industry. They did lots of valuable works. Researchers in China began to involve into this issue in 1990's. There is no correlative study analyzing the characteristics of community involvement during the course of development. Travelling is a kind of action between different communities. Since the first traveller came into a community, it means this community began to involve into tourism inevitably. In this paper, after recognizing the features of community involvement in different historical stage, the author partitioned it into four stages:individual involvement, organized involvement, mass involvement and comprehensive involvement. And then the development course was characterized as a curve similar with "S". It is necessary to point out that after the third phase, community involvement had two kinds of tendencies:One is coming down with tourism decline and attraction descending of tourism resources; The other tendency is that the destination community plays a positive role in tourism development with involving into all sectors of tourism industry and tourism decision. So based on this viewpoint, the author made and explained the suggestion that, the destination community should participate in tourism comprehensively in order to preventing the decline of tourism destination and the community disaggregation. Particularly, targeted on sustainable development of tourism industry, the destination community should do more in three aspects as following besides the economic actions:(1)Tourism decision. Especially considering more community demand in tourism planning could make it more acceptable and applicable;(2)Environment protection. After realizing that keeping a natural environment is beneficial, the residents would be more active in environment protection.(3)Culture maintenance. The destination community must do more to keep the core of local culture identified by the young generation.
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Received: 16 October 2000
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2002, Vol. 17 
