A Comparative Study on the Efficiency of Stakeholder Involvement in Community-Based Tourism (CBT) Development

Community-based tourism (CBT) is a development strategy for the community to manage its resources through the use of tourism as a medium. For CBT to operate, communities may rely on the external assistance in their development project. These stakeholders are academia, local government, and international organizations. This paper compares the work efficiency of these stakeholders’ and their involvement in operating CBT strategies. A total of 535 online respondents with work experience as different stakeholders are gathered and compared. The results shows that local government involvement is ranked the most attentive by the community, followed by the assistance of academia, the community itself, and international organizations (where appropriate). This outcome supports the idea in the literature where government is the most crucial external stakeholder to reach out to during the planning stage of CBT development, but it also suggests that the involvement of academics is more efficient than that of international organizations, possibly due to the fact that academics are from a smaller set of individuals or group with theories and consultancy expertise in the field of CBT rather than the international organizations that are more general with the power and resources they could offer. In future study, in-depth interviews with different stakeholder members would allow further explanation and observation of these relationships.