Producing differentiated community (dis)empowerment in community-based tourism: a critical review of resource, institutional and representational power

Community empowerment is widely treated as a core objective and desired outcome of community-based tourism (CBT). However, much of the existing literature continues to rely on three implicit assumptions: that communities are homogeneous social units, that participation translates into empowerment, and that empowerment is a positive and cumulative outcome. Drawing on a critical review of 62 publications on CBT, tourism empowerment, participation, power, and cultural representation, this paper examines how empowerment and disempowerment are unevenly produced, distributed, and contested within tourism development. Informed by Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power and Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and field position, the review reconceptualizes community empowerment as differentiated community (dis)empowerment: a relational process through which access to resources, decision-making authority, cultural recognition, and forms of exclusion are unevenly produced across internally differentiated actors. The paper develops a mechanism-based framework centered on resource control, institutional filtering, and cultural representation, showing how material, institutional, and representational power co-produce empowerment for some actors while generating dependency, exclusion, misrecognition, or loss of control for others. By shifting attention from whether communities are empowered to how empowerment and disempowerment are produced, distributed, and reproduced, this study contributes a relational and mechanism-based framework for analyzing CBT and its unequal consequences.