关键词: 旅游, 社区参与, 制度嵌入性, 丹霞山

Abstract:

Community participation and resident empowerment in tourism development has long been a central tenet of sustainable tourism development, which attracts substantive attention in the tourism geography arena. In recent years, a rising number of studies on tourism geography have discussed how to raise community participation and increase the benefits for local residents through institutional empowerment, either from the "top down" policy and legislation, or from the "bottom up" informal institution within communities. However, few studies have moved beyond discussing how institutions are embedded into community residents' decision making and actions in an emic perspective. This paper draws on insights from the new institutionalism and the new economic sociology, as a corrective to the dominant focus in the academic literature on the decision-making of community subjects. Thus, the paper applies the theory of institutional embeddedness to indicate what and how institutions constrain or motivate community residents' decision-making and corresponding actions in the process of tourist destination development. Qualitative methodology and grounded theory are applied in the case studies of two typical tourism communities in the Danxia Mountain, the only World Natural Heritage Site in Guangdong province. The two communities, which are located within the scenic spot and are adjacent to each other, have manifested different modes of decision-making in tourism participation while sharing a similar development background in the past three decades. The result shows that the decision-making behaviors of community subjects are rational choices embedded into multilayer institutions, which, generally speaking, include formal institutions like policies and legislation made by the government departments and the concrete destination management institutions, and informal institutions such as the clan culture, community group decision rules, folk rules, perception of fair value and many other traditional views and concepts. Particularly, the paper reveals that the difference of informal institutions existing in the two communities is the main reason for the different modes of decision making in tourism participation process, which significantly affects the benefits the local residents could receive from tourism. It is notable that the effective embeddedness of external formal institutions plays a key role in coordinating the relationship between heritage site development and community development when the internal informal institutions of the local community turn out disembedding. Finally, the paper indicates that the theory of institutional embeddedness facilitates an in-depth analysis of the different modes of tourism participation of rural communities, which provides a significant insight for both the government departments and the industrial sectors to institution design for engaging community participation in tourism development.

Key words: tourism, community participation, institutional embeddedness, Danxia Mountain