The important issue of community capacity building for tourism development in villages in mountainous areas is the common concern and academic topic in both the research fields of tourism and rural geography. Exist research has put most attention to the study of tourism participation of local communities rather than community capacity building for tourism development in destinations on the basis of the hypothesis that destination community always act as an external factor for tourism development there. Present not much literature on community tourism development primarily focuses on local residents in stead of other stakeholders. Research on the interaction and structural obstacles between stakeholders in destinations is especially limited. And the lagged research makes the expected community-economic-development goal of tourism development in mountainous area much difficult to come true. So this research is mainly designed and conducted to investigate the mechanism of community capacity building for tourism development for different stakeholders by completing a case study at local villages within and around the famous Tiantangzhai scenic area in Anhui province. This research is mainly conducted for the purpose of fair, equal utility of resources there to make harmonious social economic development in mountainous rural areas.This research was conducted in three phases including pilot study, formal study and data collection. Group and deep-interview with government officials, community leaders, tourism entrepreneurs, community elites, external investors was initially completed in pilot study to understand different stakeholders’concerns, preferences and to improve the questionnaire for formal survey. This was followed by the field questionnaire survey in eight villages in Tiantangzhai Town with a household number of 4482.500 questionnaires were distributed and 458 valid questionnaire were returned. Before questionnaire survey, the randomly selected residents were all be made a structural interview. And 193 interview data sets have been collected. Official work reports and tourism development policy documents from authorities of Lu’an city, Jingzhai county Tiantangzhai Town from 2005 to 2010 were also collected for related content analysis in this research.The cognition of community capacity building for tourism development by different stakeholders(including residents, tourists,officials, tourism entrepreneurs) together with its mechanism were explored in main part of the dissertation.For destination community, residents’cognition or perception of tourism impacts, community capacity building, dimensions of obstacles for community capacity development were quantitatively analyzed. Besides, factor analysis, multivariable variance analysis, hiriachical cluster analysis, multinominal logistic regression and canonical correlation analysis were employed to investigate the difference of tourism impacts perception, residents cluster and the influence of residents’tourism impacts perception on the mechanism of community capacity building and its obstacles. Qualitive research methods such as in-depth interview and representative case study awere completed to investigate obstacle factors for tourism development and its mechanism. It is concluded as follows:(1)As to dimensions of tourism impacts perception, community capacity and obstacles of community capacity building for tourism development, nine significant dimensions of residents’tourism impacts perception can be found in case study area, they are social benefits, social costs, cultural benefits, econimic benefits, nature protection, community satisfaction, economic expectation, community issues, support to tourism.six dimensions can be got, includeing community communicaiton and leadship, community participation, community linkage, community support, tourism knowledge and techniques, reflection of community. Similarly, twelve factors have been proved to be obstacles of community capacity for tourism development, that is, obstacles on leadship, empowerment, information, personnel, knowledge, participation, capital, awareness, development, access to tourism,communication, conflict of interest. (2)Gender, position in village authorities of respondents are significant factors that influence their perception of tourism impacts. And local residents can be clusted into four groups via cluster analysis, including Pollyanna group, community economic-oriented group, prudentially supportive group and pessimistic opposition group. All these four groups have significant differences between themselves on age, residing period, residence location, present position etc. (3) Residents’community attachment and benefit from tourism can impose significant influence on their participation in tourism and social communication; meanwhile, residents’social cost and economic benefit perception do influence their participation in tourism and communication obstacles. (4) Community tourism development obstacles primarily act in detail as space, resource, information, economic and political disempowerment. (5) Among direct factors that influence residents’tourism disempowerment, both individual factors such as age, education level, residing location, living ways and family factors including family members’physical condition, age, position, education level, income and social-economic condition determine their resource possessing condition, and them lead to their exclusion from community economic affairs and decrease of crisis-endure capability, which finally cause the occurrence of their tourism disempowerment.When it comes to tourists, the preference degree for local food in Tiantangzhai, the relationship between local food and tourists’satisfaction, influential factors of satisfaction with food and beverage were investigated through the analysis of descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and multi-nominal logistic regression modeling. Besides, qualitative analysis of collected interview data was also conducted for analyzing tourists’cognition to accommodation problems in Tiantangzhai, their perception and attitudes to community tourism participation and community capacity building for tourism development. It is concluded as followed:(l)The local dish and green food are preferred by the surveyed tourists.(2)Tourists’satisfaction with food and beverage is significantly influenced by their income and education, their travel pattern, uniqueness of local dish, dining environment and quality of dish. (3) Problems suggested by surveyed tourists include its price, food safety condition, uniqueness, services and facilities and so on. (4) Surveyed tourists have put forwarded several patterns of community participation in tourism development therein in the questionnaire survey, including deliver local agricultural, special fishery products to tourists, develop economic pasture husband for tourists, and run small catering business. The suggested measures from survey tourists for community capacity building for tourism development purpose also include:integrated development of agriculture, forest industry and tourism, building and extending tourism industry chain on the basis of multi-stakeholders cooperation and collaboration.As for local government in Tiantangzhai, based on public choice theory, growing machine theory and Structuration-Agency theory, this desertion analyzed government officials’policy preference and its influence on community tourism development policy, and then the influence of community tourism development policy on stakeholders’disempowerment or empowerment. Of course, the mechanism for such influence, mechanism for tourism spatial production and behaviors network, the formation and influence mechanism for tourism growing machine in Tiantangzhai have also been researched by means of content analysis of interview data and collected second-hand data. And some findings have been got as follow:(1) authorities at county level made more attention to its industrial and urbanization strategy and external investors hunting work.. And it directly leads the town government primarily focused on economic development, market and project construction. So the town government’s hardcore task is to invite investment from outer areas. (2) The community tourism development policy based on hunting investor and biding for investment empowered and enhanced the rights of external investors, community elites and tourists. On the other hand, local small business and residents experience disempowerment. And the mechanism for this is specified as the selective reallocation of natural resources in communities, the redistribution of residents’living and working spaces due to the tourism-led urbanization and the ecological colonialism for natural resources there. (3) Governments at province and city levels have pushed the transform from forestry space into tourism space in Tiantangzhai by means of officials inspection, local resort brand concession, administrative level promotion, propaganda campaign, investment hunting, hospitality and other facilities construction etc. (4) With reference to the behaviors network for the formation of tourism special production processes, external stakeholders include Tiantangzhai scenic area authority, city and county government, provincial government and its functional sectors, the state functional sectors; within local community, the town government, external investor, community elites, small business owners, residents are all part of the network.. All stakeholders mentioned above form the behaviors network and finally become the tourism growing machine in Tiantangzhai. And the regional influence of this tourism growing machine here contains the serious imbalance of tourism special allocation and tourism industry structure in communities, and the weak linkage between tourism industry and community economy, and obvious tourism-led urbanization and obvious island effect of tourism development here. As for tourism entrepreneurs, potential obstacle factors impacting the linkage between tourism businesses and community economy and the community capacity building for tourism development has been investigated through deep-interview with catering business owners, farmer residents and community leaders. And the following are the findings and research results:(1) obstacle factors impacting the close linkage between tourism businesses and community economy involves the supply side and demand side. For demanding factors, the primary one is the weak demanding for accommodation products due to the strong seasonality and small tourist market scale in Tiantangzhai. While for supplying factors, they are primarily the small scale food-material production due to the cold climate and not very good economical condition, and the much higher threshold for food material retail here. (2) Obstacle factors negatively impacting the close linkage between farmer residents’economic participation in tourism and community economy have been proved to be:the overlap and conflict between tourism high seasons and busy farming seasons, the relatively weak driving force of tourism development and relatively high involvement threshold, the un-economic traditional agriculture and the structural restriction to agricultural production, supply and sales for tourism industry. (3) Community supporting policies include:simplify the community tourism business running license procedures and complete one-stop service by tourism sector and other government sectors concerned, planning and projecting new tourism attractions, limiting the over aggregation of tourism space, license concession and training management for local farmers running rural tourism catering business, additional services to local residents for applying a loan, advertisement, providing hospitality service, business management and knowledge-information exchange with others etc. Besides, building and promoting the brand of agritainment and tourism booking system in Tiantangzhai is also the crucial measures for tourism business development in Tiantangzhai. (3) Supportive policies for the close linkage between tourism development and community economy in Tiantangzhai:building multi-industrial chain development based on its dominant forestry economy, paid-use of natural resources in Tiantangzhai, implementations of environment audit and ecological compensation; making full use of tourism attractions especially participable attractons in various mountainous environments here and collaboratively promoting Tiantangzhai through various ways.This research has fully investigated different stakeholders’ perception and attitudes to community capacity building for tourism development and its mechanism. And the following are the main creative points in this dissertation:(1) building the multi-dimension stakeholders tourism influence cognition model, and modifying the scale of community tourism development capacity; and then studying the community capacity dimensions for tourism development in villages in mountainous areas on this basis; (2) researching the mechanism of building community tourism development policy, the influence of governmental activity preference and administrative assessment system on tourism policies in mountainous communities, and the influence of tourism development policies on different stakeholders in communities; (3) conducting a case study in some mountainous scenic areas including local communities to investigate the formation and regional impacts of tourism growing machine on local farming communities. This research will be of great significance to understand the interaction and mechanism between different tourism system elements and theoretically helpful to make proper community tourism development policies while taking different stakeholders into consideration. |