Sustainable practices of community tourism planning: lessons from a remote community

Abstract

This article examines community tourism planning practices through the theoretical framework of deliberative democracy, and provides an example of best practices of integrating tourism planning and development into community comprehensive planning. It illustrates how a small remote community on Vancouver Island, Canada embraced practices of participatory dialogic planning in its official community planning process. Having faced a threat of tourism development going out of control, this community decided to take a proactive stance and collectively design a policy framework to guide potential developers. Fresh and innovative planning and policy approaches not only helped safeguard community and social capitals, but exemplified fresh unconventional practices of embedding community based tourism planning into broader sustainable community planning efforts.

Keywords:

• community development
• deliberative democracy
• participatory planning
• rural tourism

Notes

This study is part of a larger research project presented by the authors at the 2008 CDS Conference in Saskatoon, Canada.

1. For the purposes of this paper, bottom-up resident participation in tourism planning and decision making is defined as an ongoing process of engagement and participation at the community level, supported by the policy framework at the municipal/ regional level. As one of the reviewers of this paper correctly pointed out, one might also think of this approach in terms of partnerships including a mix of bottom-up resident participation with support from above.

2. While these two approaches provide a theoretical framework for community development practices in North America, another model that deserves attention is the one of community visioning/ strategic planning (The Community Visioning and Strategic Planning Handbook, first released in 1996, has since then been reprinted several times and is one of the National Civic League's most requested publications).

3. At that time, the land was owned by MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. (a company later bought by Weyerhaeuser—thus reference to “Weyerhaeuser lands”).