Cultivating Community Wellbeing: Guiding Principles for Research and Practice

Abstract

Studies of community wellbeing have identified numerous contributing social, economic, environmental, and cultural factors. Yet despite this diversity of dimensions, in practice many community wellbeing interventions focus on providing material resources, infrastructure, and amenities. In this perspective article, we offer an alternative approach to community wellbeing practice, drawing on several years of applied community development research and practice, formulated as principles of purpose, place, and relation. Together, these principles foster greater connectivity and resilience, support the creation of safe, dignified, and collective places and spaces, and encourage reciprocal and empathetic relations amongst people and across generations. Research and practice using these principles emphasizes being and interacting in community. Our approach is rooted in the perspective that community wellbeing could benefit not only from improved resources and infrastructure, but also from processes that promote humans willing to build and connect with community.

Over the Caribbean Top: Community Well-Being and Over-Tourism in Small Island Tourism Economies

“…Whereas social elements address community well-being and participation in labor and consumption markets, ecological elements concentrate on the conservation of local ecosystems, the management of ecosystem services, and the regulation of environmental resources. Inclusive development resonates strongly with the community well-being principles of purpose, place, and relation as discussed by Cloutier et al ( 2019 ). These principles describe the nurturing of a shared sense of identity, inclusion, and (intergenerational) equity in societies.…”

“…By deconstructing over-tourism from an emic island perspective through a political-economic institutional lens (Bishop 2012 ; Duval 2004 ), this study addresses the limitations of traditional normative and reductionistic tourism-centric approaches (Daye et al 2008 ), carrying capacity fallacies (McCool and Lime 2001 ), sustainable tourism oxymorons (Duval 2004 ; Joppe 2019 ; Peterson et al 2017 ), and conceptualizes over-tourism from a contextualized perspective in which both norms and networks of purpose, power, people, and place take center stage in social construction of tourism development and institutional behaviors (Cloutier et al 2019 ; Hall and Williams 2008 ; Joppe 2019 ; Richter 1994 ).…”

“…Inclusive development focuses on productive employment as a means of increasing income as well as raising standards of living and community well-being (Gupta and Vegeling 2016 ; Cloutier et al 2019 ). The quality of opportunity and participation in growth, with a special focus on the working poor and the un(der)employed, are integral to inclusive development (Ianchovichina and Lundstrom 2009 ; Ranieri and Ramos 2013 ; Rauniyar and Kanbur 2010 ).…”

“…These principles describe the nurturing of a shared sense of identity, inclusion, and (intergenerational) equity in societies. Community well-being constitutes a combination of multiple factors and conditions that shape community’s quality of life, including, social, environmental, economic, political, and cultural factors, which collectively and holistically, describe a community’s happiness and well-being (Cloutier et al 2019 ; Musikanski et al 2019 ). According to Scheyvens and Biddulph ( 2017 ), the ultimate goal of community-based tourism development is to empower the destination’s (host) community in four dimensions, i.e., economic, psychological, social, and political.…”

Overtourism and the Local Community Well-Being

“…So far, extensive research has been conducted on various aspects of overtourism, including its impacts on destination residents (Cheer et al 2020;Cheung and Li 2019;Goodwin 2017;Milano 2017;Milano et al 2019a;Muler Gonzalez et al 2018;Perkumienė and Pranskūnienė 2019;Sari and Nazli 2020), nature-based and protected area tourism (Chung et al 2018;Hockings et al 2020;Leung et al 2018;Mandić 2019;Spenceley et al 2017) in overtourism context (Koščak et al 2020). Also, there is a rich base of research on local communities in tourism (Fiorello and Bo 2012;Lopes et al 2015) as well as on human and community well-being (Cloutier Cloutier et al 2019;Sarkki 2017), its connection to nature (Azara et al 2018;Naidoo et al 2019;Sandifer et al 2015) and tourism (Dwyer 2020;Musikanski et al 2019). This chapter fills the gap in the research of local communities' well-being in nature-based tourism in the era of overtourism.…”