Author:

Abstract

Community-Based Tourism (CBT) has emerged in many countries as a tool for poverty reduction and sustainability enhancement. Even though sustainability practices are essential for promoting community-level tourism, due to lack of capacity and know-how, poor attitudes, reluctance to change, etc. cause to lower the application of sustainability practices by community tourism entrepreneurs. Therefore, CBT projects were initiated and greater efforts were taken to indoctrinate the sustainability practices among the micro and small scale tourism entrepreneurs (MSSTEs). However, several past researchers argued that those efforts were unable to build fruitful results. This was reported in several community tourism villages, especially in the Sri Lankan context. Therefore, this research endeavors to study the impact of empowerment efforts of CBT projects on the adoption of sustainability practices by the MSSTEs. The structured questionnaire survey was applied for data collection from a sample of 200 MSSTEs in six villages of Sri Lanka who were empowered by two selected CBT projects. Empowerment efforts were the independent variable, and capacity building, financial assistance, education and training, network building, monitoring and evaluation were the five sub-constructs of it. Sustainability practices were the dependent variable and economic, social and cultural, and environmental sustainability were the three sub-constructs of it. Findings revealed that CBT empowerment efforts affect significantly on the adoption of the three facets of sustainability practices by the MSSTEs. Economic sustainability was the highest achieved practice and it implies that CBT project empowerments were able to eliminate poverty in the rural community and strengthen their economic status.

Keywords: Community based tourism projects, Community tourism entrepreneurs, Empowerment efforts, Sustainability practices