Participation in Community-based Tourism Development of the Ban Pong Manao Community, Lopburi Province

Abstract

          Community-based tourism (CBT) involves a wide range of stakeholders, such as management, community development, tourism businesses, and some forms of cultural places, where tourists meet with the local community to discover different sides of their lifestyle. CBT comes with an inclusive approach. It contains anything that promotes actual community participation and stimulates resulting benefits. Moreover, CBT as a visitor-host relation generates additional economic growth and aims towards conservation and preservation of local communities and their surrounding environments. CBT focuses mainly, but not solely, on community participation. However, this research studies underlying factors that, 1) generally affect participation in the development of sustainable tourism, and 2) the level of villagers’ participation of community-based tourism development in Ban Pong Manao, Huai Khunram, Pattananikom, Lopburi. Questionnaires were collected from 200 people from the local community in Ban Pong Manao Tumbol Huai Khunram, Phattananikom, Lopburi. The findings indicate that locals participate in their community on a fairly high level but they lack further support from other organizations to achieve and maintain sustainable tourism. The results of hypotheses testing reveal that on one hand, environmental factors such as the socio-economic environment certainly influence local community participation in sustainable tourism development. On the other hand, local wisdom does not. That goes along with the fact that emotional safety and the necessity of becoming an active community member are also considered important sources of influence, but that the feeling of belonging to such a sustainable environment is not considered of great importance to the local community.