Planning Sustainable Community-Based Tourism in the Context of Thailand: Community, Development, and the Foresight Tools

Abstract

Community-Based Tourism (CBT) has been heavily promoted in Thailand, particularly in rural communities. Tourism transforms the natural and culturally significant attractions of rural communities into consumer products. Tourism development also makes a direct connection between tourism and the community. Therefore, before starting a tourism development project, the interests of local residents need to be investigated and allowances made for their inclusion. This paper introduces foresight tools, community arts, and a community goal-setting technique for putting the authority of future tourism development in the hands of the local community, which is appropriate for tourism development in rural Thailand. This study aims to give the local community useful tools to design their own future development by helping its members develop an understanding of what tourism is and how it impacts their community. A series of inclusive workshops was used to emphasize the need to understand the opportunities and repercussions of tourism as a community, what is at stake, and how important it is to participate in development projects. This methodology was chosen to advance the community members’ ability to generate ideas about what kind of tourism products the community has the potential to develop. Furthermore, it aims to get locals to understand that tourism development is more than just getting that development started. Reaching their future goals requires continuing their tourism activities. Therefore, the two workshops we held advocated community arts and community goal-setting techniques as foresight tools to empower communities to design their future and gave support to those communities to improve the quality of their participation in tourism.

1. Introduction

The booming tourism industry in Thailand has raised demand for the development of new tourist destinations across the country. Rural communities are the target communities for development. Rural communities are a basic reason for tourists to travel, as tourists wish to experience their way of life and material products [1]. However, once tourism starts to be developed in a community, it marks the beginning of a transformation process for the host society. In the tourism literature, the concern over negative host-guest relations in rural communities has long been addressed. Murphy [2] notes the industry uses the community as a resource, sells it as a product, and in the process, affects the lives of everyone. Chatkaewnapanon [3] also writes that tourism development processes influence the social structure and the historical sequence of the development of a destination. In particular, tourism can create changes in values and systems, traditional lifestyles, individual behavior, and community structure. This reflects on local communities in relation to tourism development, as they are key players and affected social groups.

The raising of awareness of tourism as a social activity [4], which has both positive and negative implications for destination communities, has called for an alternative tourism development model [5]. A concept known as community-based tourism (CBT) has been introduced to avoid rapid tourism development without an understanding of the local economy and the quality of local livelihoods. This concept suggests that tourism development projects should be managed and owned by the community, for the community, with the purpose of enabling visitors to increase their awareness and learn about the community and the locals’ ways of life [6]. CBT is, therefore, a development concept that can be used to prevent over-rapid tourism development and encourage the local community to take control of the development process as well as its outcomes [7].

This paper discusses the relationship between a local community and its tourism development beyond the local participation concept in the tourism planning context. Specifically, the paper considers communities to be active partners in their tourism development projects, though this is challenging to accomplish. In this paper, the complex interrelations between Baan Nakian, a remote ethnic community in Northern Thailand, and its tourism development project are discussed. The purpose is to present the compatibility of foresight methodologies in tourism development with the competitive demands of rural community spaces, thus improving the innovative techniques for sustainable community development. In this respect, the paper examines the role of foresight methodologies in helping a community to attain its future tourism development more sustainably.

To discuss foresight tools such as strategic visioning in the tourism development process, the paper starts off by providing an overview of the literature covering tourism planning, CBT development, and foresight strategies. After that, the paper discusses the site of the research, its approach, and the research methodologies used in the study. In the results and analysis section, the paper addresses the importance of two workshops regarding community arts methodologies as a foresight technique in tourism development. More specifically, this paper addresses the significance of the two workshops, with one involving the discussion of a village sketch map drawing and the other involving the discussion of future community goal-setting workshops in the Baan Nakian context. Then, the concluding section discusses the compatibility of community, tourism, and development aided by foresight tools.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Tourism Planning and CBT Development

In this paper, the discussion of the concept of community-based tourism emphasizes the issues found in regard to rethinking the approaches and practices of community tourism development in Thailand. It fills the gaps in tourism planning, emphasizing local participation practices and the ability of the local community to plan, develop, and manage its own future tourism [8]. Creating tourism in a community is about the development of local tourist attractions (products) from natural and cultural resources [9,10]. It is the process of a locality being developed into tourism assets for tourists to consume. However, tourism in a community is not only about the geographic location but also about the particular local social system [1] of a place. Communities in tourism planning can embrace notions of spatial contiguity, social interaction, reflexivity, notions of shared aspirations, and values [11]. Thus, the process of tourism development simultaneously incorporates the experience of local geography and rural community livelihoods for tourists to consume.

However, while tourists enjoy the local resources, the local communities witness the transformation of their society. The implications of tourism are that there will be changes in the socio-cultural and environmental livelihoods of the local community members [3]. These problematic situations are starting to call the world to question tourism development and the environmental issues it can cause in prospective tourist destinations. In response, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) of the United Nations launched the concept of sustainable development, which emphasizes the right of local people to take part in development projects throughout the development process [12].

A community becomes the central point of any tourism development project. This makes community participation a core requirement in tourism development principles and practices [13]. In this respect, a tourism-planning approach should be a central concern and be introduced to and widely practiced in a community. Tourism development makes a direct connection between tourism and the destination community. It is a theoretical addition to the tourist destination development literature [14,15,16,17,18]. Therefore, local communities must be included in the initial discussions on whether tourism needs to be developed in their communities [19]. Furthermore, the focus of community participation is on the integration of local communities into the whole process of tourism development, from the initial stages of decision-making and planning to the execution and assessment of a project [20,21]. Consistent with the CBT approach, the community should be treated as an active partner in tourism development projects to address the connection between the development of the community and any changes that the development brings.

Therefore, it is important for this framework to help local residents to identify tourism, the relationships between tourism and development, and the possible implications of tourism for their community. Once the local community understands all these tourism-related issues, community participation may possibly be appropriate. In other words, the community’s knowledge of tourism, development, and sustainability will allow locals to gain confidence in regard to participating in a tourism development project.

The challenge of tourism planning at the community level is sustaining a balance between three elements of tourism. First, a local community must offer a positive tourism experience; second, it must provide a justifiable livelihood for the local community; and third, it must audit and monitor the first two elements so that together they do not destroy the environment that initially attracted tourists to that community. For local communities and developers to accomplish this strategic planning of tourism development, all participants must be committed to using all available local resources responsibly and triggering development and prosperity through local initiatives [7]. The community has to have intimate knowledge of the social ecosystem of its society. Moreover, this approach requires the locals to anticipate, regulate, and monitor changes in order to contribute to the wider sustainability of a destination and thereby enhance the tourist experience of that destination [22]. This gives the local community the authority not only to take control of but also to benefit from tourism development [23].

The concept of local participation in tourism planning attempts to promote the community’s economic and social processes as well as equity in the distribution of tourism development [24]. Tourism planners quickly assume that a community has the ability to contribute clearly to the decision-making process [25] and will be able to redeem equitably shared benefits throughout the development process [26]. Accordingly, tourism planners encourage communities to participate in the planning process based on the assumption that they have the capability to make choices and influence the outcomes of tourism development [13,24,27,28]. However, although there is an obligation for communities to be involved in all steps of the planning process, there is no guarantee that they will be able to take control of and benefit from tourism development [29].

The work by Mwantimwa [30] recognizes that rural development is more than the quantum of community participation. Nonetheless, he presents the need for quality participation in terms of knowledge and the informed locals who take part in development projects. However, the question being asked is: what kind of information, knowledge, and skills are required to encourage the community to progress to a better quality of participation in every step of the tourism-planning process [31]? Therefore, the author is not only forging academic–local alliances to accomplish the sustainability project but also introducing foresight methodologies that can be used to encourage villagers from Baan Nakian to realize the importance of tourism, to understand the implications of its development, and, most importantly, to comprehend its development, management, planning, and marketing. These are the methodologies for tourism planning that we expect locals to use in regard to confidently, intellectually, and ethically developing tourism in their community.

2.2. Foresight Strategies: Empowering Realization

The perspective of sustainability raises the issues of development and community values, which are the core concerns of sustainable community development. Addressing the community’s challenges by controlling tourism development and by integrating sustainability and participation into the local community development process will better serve the community and meet its future needs. However, local communities often face complex issues in the developmental practices of the tourism industry and conflict over community development. Therefore, it should be highlighted that this situation requires the knowledge and ability to help a community realize its potential and communicate possible advantages, as well as inspire the level of effective participation that is necessary for the community to progress. In essence, a way to improve local participation in the development process is to strengthen local social and economic capacity.

Foresight, as a tool in development planning, has received a great deal of attention, particularly in developing countries in recent decades. Foresight is the umbrella term for those innovative strategic planning, policy formulation, and solution design methods that do not predict or forecast the future but work with alternative futures [9]. Prospectively, foresight is decidedly future-oriented. Part of this increased attention is a result of the need for public planners to use new methods that are compatible with the unfolding future [9] (p. 7) to achieve sustainable development. In this respect, foresight is used to create preferred futures and focus on changing the present to nurture conditions for those futures to emerge [9] (p. 15).

Furthermore, the foresight frameworks have provided an intensive way of overviewing SDG implementation, which is to identify alternative futures and create new strategies for reducing risks and developing resilience [9] (p. 15). Thus, the objective of foresight is to provide planners with techniques that will facilitate the future. In other words, it provides insight regarding how to look at the future [9] (p. 21). It is a forward-looking approach–from the present to the future [9] (p. 21). However, implementing foresight tools is challenging. Foresight is the desire to set priorities through participation-oriented goals and to build new networks around common visions and strategies [32,33]. Thus, to implement foresight is to implement participatory research. It is to immerse the stakeholders in the future situation [9] (p. 37). In addition, the use of foresight for empowering the future of those in developing countries requires thoughtful processes, including the understanding of current situations, expectations of future positions, and the realization of how to get there. Foresight, therefore, sheds new light upon the role of human development [34].

Foresight is a set of innovative tools to ideate its shape and realize the future [9]. Foresight also refers to a strategic thinking capability, which in this paper, following UNDP [9], is defined as an empowered futures framework. Foresight cultivates crucial skills such as cross-impact analysis and synthesis, systems thinking, wind tunneling, and planning for long-term and deep uncertainties [9]. Therefore, foresight is central to our vision of the future [9], where it has significance in the business context as a tool to support enterprises in regard to making strategic decisions [35]. In the past, foresight was often used to prepare enterprises for unforeseeable future development, whereas today, it is often more active, aiming to influence future development [9] (p. 6).

To follow Voros [36], community foresight requires thinking to be more open, clear, collective, and conscious before community members can be able to think systematically about the future. Therefore, a clear picture of where the future will take it as well as clear processes to achieve that future need to be put in place to empower communities to think about their futures. To paraphrase Georghiou and Keenan [32], this paper uses foresight to assist research on the basis of future societal challenges; to re-orient and investigate new development structures; and to bring awareness regarding future tourism challenges to the community.

In this paper, foresight is used to discover the perspectives regarding future societal challenges in Baan Nakian, social-environmental situations with local manifestations, and tourism impacts. Specifically, this paper is about Baan Nakian’s residents facing the challenges of crossing cultural, natural, and geographical phenomena in the tourism context and needing to think about their future via the foresight-based strategic process.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. The Research Site

Baan Nakian is a part of Chiang Mai Province and is about 300 km west of Chiang Mai City. The village is located in the highlands next to the Thai–Myanmar border. With its environmental difficulties and poor road conditions, it takes about six hours in good weather to get into this Karen ethnic community. Baan Nakian is in a similar situation to what Dukic and Volic [7] say about Serbia and the Balkans: “not yet ‘touristically’ active or industrially developed, with [Baan Nakian] standing somewhere in between modernization and traditional practices existing in a sort of vacuum of time and space, not celebrated enough to be commercialized, yet not completely neglected or abandoned”. Although the village has recently had electricity connected, it is almost totally cut off from the outside world during the rainy season.

This paper is a part of a development project of the Thai government through the office of the Narcotics Control Board (NCB) to eliminate opium plantations and poverty in rural communities. The NCB, in cooperation with the Thai military, has developed policies to suppress, eradicate, and enforce law strategies to address opium problems across the nation. Although the success of opium poppy eradication policies has been witnessed, with a massive reduction of nationwide opium cultivation, the total elimination of opium cultivation in Baan Nakian is still a challenge. According to the NCB, poverty is the stinging issue behind the complexity of opium cultivation in the village. Various reasons have been elaborated upon, including issues not exclusive or limited to economic opportunities. Therefore, the NCB seeks a new economic approach, not only to deal with the opium cultivation problem but also to eliminate the main cause of it: poverty.

When it comes to poverty elimination and improving the livelihood of Baan Nakian, the reactions of the NCB, the Thai military agents, as well as the subdistrict of the Administrative Organization of Baan Nakian are not much different; they all had the idea of creating tourism. Thus, the project of developing community tourism in the village initially started with government agents. Accordingly, the first author, an academic from the tourism department of a university in the area, has been contracted to work collaboratively and effectively on the project.

Regardless of the focal point of developing community-based tourism, the participation of the local community throughout the development process is important (UNWTO 2008); thus, the development project has been started in a similar fashion to what Moscardo [8] complains is the process in which tourism is commonly and initially planned without consulting local stakeholders’ interests. The government agents required the author to be a leader in the production and communication of knowledge, focusing on tourism trends and issues as well as the dissemination of this knowledge to the village. In particular, the government agents wanted the author to play a leading role in forging new alliances and leading the development and growth of these partnerships politically, intellectually, and ethically. In other words, in this partnership, the author is expected to support the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) policies in the village.

3.2. Research Design

The authors recognize the potential of tourism as a major mechanism for the village’s economic development as much as the importance of the villagers to work on their own futures. Therefore, this paper adopts the foresight approach to empower the locals to construct development narratives of their desired futures [9]. The authors utilized the sustainability concept to portray the goals of sustainable tourism in order to indicate a future related to a sustainable community. The reason for this is to help guide the villagers on how they might develop tourism to address their needed future. Specifically, this is an approach regarding the process of localizing the tourism development vision. To follow the Foresight Manual: Empowered Futures for the 2030 Agenda from UNDP [9], the villagers need to sharpen and realize their own futures, leveraging emerging opportunities and minimizing risks. To achieve that, two foresight tools, a community arts methodology and a community goal-setting workshop, assist the creation of future development realities in the village.

3.2.1. Community Arts Methodology: A Drawing Workshop

According to the web page of the Tate Gallery in Britain, “community art is an artistic activity that is based in a community setting, characterized by interaction or dialogue with the community and collaborating with people who may not otherwise engage in the arts”. Therefore, community arts are originally a conception of artists working individually or collaboratively, in which the result is conceived as a continuing project [37]. An approach using the drawing workshop is qualitative field research. Specifically, drawing is a medium that has the ability to enable the maker to reach beyond a superficial level of the maker’s views about a subject [38]. Artworks are designed to engage with a focused community and empower people to give their voice [39].

Chatkaewnapanon and Kelly [38] followed community arts as an alternative methodology for tourism planning. They have organized two drawing workshops in two small different villages in Thailand, one in Chiang Khan [38] and another one in Mae Klang Luang (unpublished article). The workshop on community arts practices [38] is aimed to construct an awareness among the villagers of their resources and the attractiveness of their assets. It is important to empower the locals to know and understand “the core values of their own resources” [39].

Community arts are utilized as a foresight tool for the villagers to use to think about the implications of tourism development in their villages. Both workshops work with young generations who are now living in their village’s tourism period [3]. The authors asked each of them to draw two drawings of how they viewed their villages now and then. “The drawings became the stimulus for discussion, acknowledging the changes that members of the community foresee in their future” [38] (p. 376). Community arts are a method of empowerment [39] that allows participants to express how they imagine their community [37,40].

3.2.2. Community Goal Setting: An In-Depth Discussion Focus Group

Focus group discussion is a technique where a researcher assembles a group of individuals to discuss a specific topic, aiming to draw from the complex personal experiences, beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes of the participants through moderated interaction [41]. Focus group discussion is a technique that allows a researcher to conduct research within a socially complex relationship framework [42].

Goal setting is a foresight technique that can encourage locals to participate and discuss their futures in a small, focused group. Maintaining community foresight is not easy, and people’s habits regarding thinking about the future run deep [43,44]. Humans have a cognitive and social bias to deny change and cast reality in familiar categories [9,45]; in this respect, the focus group aims to meld an in-depth discussion with community goal setting. Therefore, a goal-setting technique in a focus group workshop gives a local community an avenue to express ideas about the places they want to occupy in the future.

A community goal setting project is conducted to encourage the villagers to think about what they want the village to be like in the future and how the community could reach that position through tourism development [44,46]. It is an envisioning exercise that can be used to address critical concerns about the community’s development, including tourism development. The foresight technique gives authority to the villagers, as they are the ones who are responsible for and in control of any development, and they are also part of the decision-making process.

3.3. Sampling and Data Collection

This paper utilizes a qualitative approach to exercise foresight tools to raise awareness of local resources, future tourism development, and the implications that this development may have for the local community [47]. The authors help the community members use forward-thinking to imagine and plan their futures. This paper uses these tools as consultative methods to introduce ways to show the villages the value of tourism development and its sustainability, such as embedding tourism development in their visions by using community arts practices and goal-setting techniques to encourage and shape the village’s approach to envisioning the future [48,49]. In this respect, the authors adopt the foresight methodology and workshop techniques to collect data. Foresight methodologies can be viewed as frameworks for making sense of data generated by structured processes to think about the future. Specifically, there are two workshops: a drawing workshop and an in-depth discussion focus group workshop, in which there are forty and fifty villagers participating, respectively. In terms of age, the participants range from people in their 20s to those in their 60s; however, the second workshop includes extra participants aged between 17 and 20.

To reflect on Rawson [40], the atmosphere is important when it comes to encouraging participants to fully participate. Therefore, the drawing workshop is organized in a public space, allowing participants who might not normally join to draw and talk. The outcome of the community arts workshop, through a co-creation between the authors and the community, can be either art objects or a dialogic process [38]. In a focus group workshop, the role of the researcher is to ask questions and stimulate the dynamics of the discussion. However, the researcher facilitates a group discussion between the participants, not between the researcher and the participants [46]. In the case of Baan Nakian, the aim of the focus group is to uncover people’s perceptions and values regarding tourism development.

Most of the people who attended the focus group in this study were local residents. They were artisans, in similar numbers of men and women. Most of them have lived in the village all their lives, and only a few moved into the village through their marriages. Their education levels were low, as most graduated from a primary school, few did from a high school, and only three held bachelor’s degrees. None of them were working in tourism-related industries.

3.4. Data Collection and Analysis

3.4.1. Village Sketch Map: Understanding the Current Situation

In the case of Baan Nakian, a workshop focused on drawing a village map was organized by the government agents working in the village. This study agrees with George, Mair, and Reid [41], who noted that tourism is not viewed as a distinct planning category by government regulations. In fact, it should be initiated by incorporating different stakeholders from a community into an interactive system in a planning process [42]. Therefore, the workshop began with informing the locals about the initial idea of developing tourism in the village. It aimed to get the community to create a vision for their future development [41].

About forty villagers participated in this workshop, working collaboratively with the author. The participants were of the working age of the community, ranging from their 20s to 60s. To create confidence, trust, and strength in the drawing workshop, the author asked the villagers to unite into small groups with people who had related visions and draw as a team. This is in line with the idea that participants with related and/or shared experiences will gain confidence [43] and trust [44]. The aim of this step was to allow people with a similar way of viewing the world to create an informal workshop ambiance among themselves. Then the author asked each group to draw a map of Baan Nakian. Particularly, it was to show the extent of the community assets that each group thought about presenting to visitors. This was the assessment process through which local residents evaluated their resources. The process was meant to encourage the community to realize potential tourism resources that could offer distinctive experiences to tourists [45,46]. Figure 1 and Figure 2 show the actual images of how they designed the village map together and presented it in the meeting.

3.4.2. Future Goals: Anticipation for Tourism Development

After the drawing workshop, which sought to identify the current resource situation in Baan Nakian, there was another in-depth discussion group workshop. Specifically, the authors introduced a community goal-setting exercise with the aim to organize an in-depth discussion about the future position that the local residents were expecting to reach. This workshop was organized by the same government agents. According to Chatkaewnapanon and Kelly [38], the younger generation is normally excluded from the tourism development process regardless of whether the sustainability concept is trying to address their needs. Therefore, in the second workshop, there were 50 participants in the focus group, and this number included both male and female young people aged between 17 and 20.

Following Krueger and Casey [49], participants are organized into small groups with similar characteristics to encourage full engagement in group discussions. Moreover, George et al. [41] note that trust is generated, and people generally feel comfortable that their positions will be heard and taken seriously by decision-makers in this type of process. Accordingly, participants were grouped with those whom they were related to in terms of age, gender, and profession. After breaking into small groups, the community was asked to write about what they would like and expect the village to be in the next five years.

This is the process of getting participants to envision the probable and the desirable futures of their community. It is a brainstorming process as well as an in-depth discussion activity between members of the group. After that, each group was asked to think about whether tourism could help them to get to their set goals. Whether the answer was yes or no, they then needed to explain how and why tourism was related to their future goals. The activities in the focus group were conducted to inspire the villagers to use foresight regarding the relations between their future community and its tourism development

Figure 3 illustrates the method with the greatest probability of success in regard to encouraging locals to voice their wishes and expectations.

4. Results and Analysis

4.1. The Art Workshop

The process of mapping the community helped the local residents to list and describe the major attributes in the community that would be incorporated into the tourism product [41]. Every group made a drawing of the village based on what the members anticipated to be important. The process reflected the idea that the link between people’s perceptions and their socio-cultural situation is critical to their decision-making regarding natural resources [47]. This is because most people derive their notions, mental constructions, and interpretations from their immediate surroundings, developing them from experiential knowledge [47]. The village sketch map revealed the impulse of each group to address the cultural and physical features of the community. Thus, the potential tourism features of Baan Nakian were identified. The detailed differences in each drawing mirrored how they felt about being embedded in their community. The workshop motivated the local residents to focus on their own spaces and places. Most importantly, different maps from different groups helped them realize that there were many resources that could be developed into tourist activities.

The workshop aimed to not only gather information on the local perspectives of the village but also to allow the locals to assertively express themselves regarding their community. Thus, the different aspects of village sketch maps from each group became a subject of workshop presentation and discussion. The discussion led them to point out on their maps the kinds of experiences that could be offered to tourists. In the meantime, the process helped the local community realize that CBT is the process of making tourism, not the final product of its development. Specifically, they visualized the type of tourism that would be the final product they wished to develop based on their local assets. The sketch maps then encouraged the community members to put together their views of what type of tourism would be compatible for their village, given their existing natural and cultural resources. It is a way of inspiring the community to imagine tourism as a part of their social system, subject to development and the available resources.

The workshops are by no means exclusive to tourism development planning. It was important that the locals truly understood their own community and its attractiveness [48]. In essence, a community arts workshop works on tourism product plans, if there are any. It is a way of setting the groundwork for the community to communicate and make decisions on their future tourism development. Therefore, the community arts method is encouraging the community to not only participate in the tourism development process, but also to think about the types of tourism and activities that could be developed. This is not only a way of collecting information but also allowing the villagers to rethink their community. Throughout the process, the village sketch map transforms the perceptions and experiences of the participants towards their own community through art [38].

4.2. The Goal Setting

Each group pictured its future differently. Therefore, the results varied depending on what the group members were being confronted with at the time, such as an economic recession, lack of local products, land ownership problems, low living standards, family choice issues, disease, and food scarcity, for example. A presentation by each group of what was in their lists led to further discussion on what aspects of and how the proposals in the lists could be associated with tourism development. This process aimed to inspire the villagers’ foresight of the implications of tourism in their future community. In other words, the workshop became a platform for the discussion of which aspects of the plans were directly and indirectly associated with tourism. This process was an important part of integrating the host community and their localities into the tourism-planning process. Once the initial notion of developing tourism was established, other stages in the planning process could be engaged.

By setting a long-term goal for achievement, the community would realize what it needed to achieve for the future plans of the community. The central concept of the workshop was community, and the community development approach led the locals to recognize their strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, it provided them with the ability to think about how to address their weaknesses and emphasize their strengths before starting to develop tourism. As the result, the community appointed a group of local representatives to work closely and collaboratively with the government agents and the author. Objectively, it is a group that has the knowledge and skills to comprehend information regarding difficult and complex issues and to otherwise be trained in tourism-related development skills. This is meant to be a community-driven process.

5. Conclusions

Moscardo [8] concedes that a community needs to decide if they want tourism. If the initial tourism development is based on the local community’s approach, then the tourism development process would get more local attention. This paper has discussed methods to encourage a proactive attitude towards local participation as well as improve the quality of the outcomes of participating in tourism development. Moreover, Mwantimwa [30] points out that acquiring more knowledge will help the community to obtain development processes more effectively. Therefore, the paper is not only about encouraging community participation in every step of the tourism development process but also intends to show that it is necessary to improve the quality of community participation in the planning process to achieve it.

Developing tourism in a rural community is not an easy task. The residents need to understand their tourism resources, infrastructure, and facilities. More importantly, they need to realize that CBT is not a tourism product; it is, in fact, a development process. Thus, they need to be aware of the tourism types and experiences that they are aiming to develop. To create CBT successfully, tourism planners need to raise awareness in the community regarding what it will take for them to establish sustainable community tourism development. In this respect, the paper suggests that foresight methodologies are appropriate as a research tool in this situation.

Thus, this paper uses foresight tools to achieve a local understanding of the potential for tourism development and its implications for the community and the residents’ livelihoods. The paper introduces a workshop on a village sketch map as a community arts methodology to help the community visually evaluate its resources in terms of potential tourism attractions, infrastructure, facilities, and spatial layout. It helps the locals to understand that their natural and cultural resources are tourism products and allows them to understand that the tourism industry has the potential to be developed.

Moreover, the paper presents a future goal workshop as a community goal-setting technique designed to guide the local community to understand the implications of tourism development in the community with the hope of enhancing their involvement in all steps of the development process [50]. The local people and tourism planners need a framework of tourism development knowledge to pursue the implications of becoming a tourist destination. Thus, the two workshops not only aim to encourage the local residents to fully participate in the activities themselves but also to allow them to truly understand how important it is to participate. If they have ideas regarding potential tourism products, this will improve the quality of their participation.

Furthermore, practical implications are important because they help the locals understand that tourism development is about more than just starting, as sustainable continuation is just as important. Reaching their future goals is the means to continue their tourism activities. Therefore, the two workshops, community arts and community goal-setting techniques, are foresight tools that can empower residents to envision their futures and improve their quality of participation. This study is one of the few insightful cases from Southeast Asian countries that demonstrates how community-driven tourism development can make a difference if it involves the proactive participation of residents and their professional perceptions. However, tourism is a trend-related activity, and its implications for destination communities can vary. Foresight strategies, through different tools and techniques, need to be applied regularly to keep community and tourism development on the right track.