Tourism is promoted as a pathway for rural development, but its community value depends on how residents experience participation, recognition, trust, and adaptation. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document review across selected rural tourism communities in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, this paper explores how residents perceive tourism’s social, cultural, and economic impacts, how trust in governance is formed and challenged, and how resilience is enacted through everyday practice. The analysis develops three concepts, visitation optimum, trust gradient, and resilience embeddedness, to explain how tourism becomes meaningful through symbolic recognition, how trust varies across governance relationships, and how adaptation is rooted in cultural continuity and social interdependence. Situated within the Community Capitals Framework, these concepts foreground the relational, emotional, and uneven nature of community development in tourism contexts. The findings offer practical insights for designing inclusive, culturally grounded, and resilience-oriented tourism strategies in line with Sustainable Development Goal 11.
Huu Nghia Le (Tue,) studied this question.