Community Participation as a mediating factor on residents’ attitudes towards sustainable tourism development and their personal environmentally responsible behaviour

This pioneering study explores the powerful mediating effect of community participation on both residents’ attitudes toward sustainable tourism development and their personal environmentally responsible behaviour. It establishes residents’ attitudes when the concept of sustainable tourism development is introduced, measures its influence on their participation in public affairs, and the importance of their own environmentally responsible behaviour. It explores the complex relationships between attitude, community participation, and environmentally responsible behaviour involved, using a survey of 362 residents from 5 eco-tourism communities in Taiwan. Results show that residents’ attitudes towards sustainable tourism development positively and significantly affect both community participation and environmentally responsible behaviour. The degree of residents’ community participation also positively affects environmentally responsible behaviour. Residents’ attitudes toward sustainable tourism development also directly affected environmentally responsible behaviour as well as indirectly affect behaviour via the mediator, “community participation”.Five mechanisms are suggested to encourage these changes: (1) Institutions develop community sustainable tourism civic education, (2) cohesion and insight for consciousness events to promote sustainable tourism development attitudes, (3) lively public hearings should be encouraged to turn passive into active participation, (4) mechanisms for reporting environmental damage should be created, and (5) community environmental clean-up days should be held.