Indicators of sustainable community based rural tourism: a review

Abstract

When it comes to examining the uncertain world with a concern for sustainable development, it is obviously important to know if such actions, however marginal, might create positive and/or negative impacts in terms of meeting sustainability goals. In the context of sustainable community based rural tourism (CBRT) programmes, these impacts could involve changes in the physical environment of rural areas and/or associated social and economic aspects of their inhabitants. The decisions on planning and development of sustainable CBRT programmes made either by government or by local stakeholders are intended to overcome the current problems faced by rural communities. In this light, putting plans or programmes into reality is important, to achieve the stated goal of positive implications, and more importantly, to ensure that the implementation of such programmes should not impose new problems or undesirable living conditions for rural communities. Therefore, as one of management tools, indicators are needed to make rational policy choices on sustainable CBRT programmes and as one way of assessing the contribution of CBRT towards sustainable rural development. This paper includes a review on the concept of sustainability indicators, beginning with explanations on the need for indicators and current practices in deriving sustainability indicators based on experiences from three South East Asian countries. The review concludes with discussion of challenges in sustainability indicators work especially in dealing with the planning for an uncertain future.