Developing a system of community-based agritourism for sustainable local food systems: a multi-case study of rural livelihood diversification and sustainable urban consumption in city-regional Bangkok

Abstract

Current food systems fail to directly link rural producers and urban consumers. This research explores and categorizes emerging community-based agritourism practices as strategies to reconnect rural food producers with urban consumers. The main research question of this study is: how can community-based agritourism link rural food producers and urban consumers as a rural livelihood diversification strategy? Mixed methods for data collection were selected to answer this question and analyzed with a deductive and inductive approach. These include the review of secondary grey and academic literature, shadow observation in three rural provinces, content validity index calculation performed by experts (n = 17), semi-structured multistakeholder interviews (n = 40), in-depth interviews with rural community leaders (n = 10) and a survey questionnaire distributed to a sample of urban consumers living in Bangkok (n = 400). Research outputs include: (1) an integrated framework of indicators to categorize rural livelihood diversification practices, built on the four environmental, sociocultural, economic, and health dimensions; (2) a list of rural diversification practices emerging in Bangkok cityregion, with culinary tourism being a prominent one; (3) the statistical validation of the association between urban-rural relation and sustainable consumption, confirming that strong consumer-producer links lead to sustainable consumption and sustainable local food systems and (4) recommendations targeting community-based agritourism experiences to specific consumer niches. In this way, products and services can effectively leverage on context-specific environmental, sociocultural, economic and health assets of local rural communities.