Community Participation Into The Sustainable Development Of Rural Tourism Based On Empowerment Theory

Rural tourism has been the focus of tourism researches mainly because of the crazy pursuit for the sort of tourism activity home and abroad. As to the remote undeveloped rural areas, the advantages of developing tourist resources offer them the good opportunity to increase income, promote the urbanization, and impel the industrial transformation. Meanwhile, the appropriate developing mechanism and governance system is supposed to be applied into the process of rural tourism development, which is also the necessary practice to avoid a series of problems, such as the decline of rural attractiveness, rural destination’s decay, and the disintegration of rural community, to guarantee the sustainable development of rural tourism.Due to the highly overlapping or consistency between rural destination and rural community, community participation becomes the key to the sustainable development of rural tourism. And the Community Participation into the Sustainable Development of Rural Tourism (CPSDRT) means first of all, considering the needs and voices of local community into the process of rural tourism planning, developing, decision-making, governing, and supervision, and making local community be the main player of rural tourism developing, to guarantee the sustainable development of rural tourism and the integral development of local community. Therefore, this paper discusses the contents, forms, sizes and problems in the process of CPSDRT and concludes four stages of CPSDRT and three characters of motivation of local community involved into rural tourism.However, community participation only theoretically proves the sustainable development of rural tourism. We must realize the quantitative fails of community participation in the practice of rural tourism developing in China and think of the further reason. From the perspective of the theory of empowerment, this paper points out that the lacks of community sense and community power are the major limits of CPSDRT in this developing country. Thus, CPSDRT is supposed to progressively empower the local community in four dimensions complying with the principle of sustainable development. Furthermore, on the basis of these theories, this paper creates the model of CPSDRT paths including the ideal path, polarized path and the possible paths. In the conclusion, the general suggestion on how to empower local community and push their sustainable development is put forward.