Exploring the role of nested institutions in community-based tourism development: Two case studies from China’s Tibetan pastoral region

Abstract

Community-based tourism is key to rural sustainable development. However, information remains inadequate on how natural resource management institutions restructure community social capital and property rights regimes while developing community cooperation and tourism participation within evolving rural socio-economic systems. This study investigates two rural villages, one under a household-based rangeland transfer system and the other under a community cooperative institution, to quantitatively assess how each mediates rights-based, structure-based, and network-based access mechanisms influencing community cooperation and tourism outcomes. The community cooperative institution facilitated higher rights-based and network-based access to tourism resources and markets for all community members, improving tourism participation and the equitable distribution of tourism benefits. This is because it uses hybrid and nested property rights provisions and social capital operating at different scales to protect individual rights and the balance of power. These practices restore social reciprocity, community redistribution, and market networks in building community cooperation, which better responds to the changing features of the rural socio-economic system. Therefore, social capital and property rights regimes are components of a nested community institution used to restructure social networks, rights, and entitlements. By these means, rural communities can devise different cooperative scales to govern their access to tourism resources and markets.

Keywords:

• Community-based tourism
• social capital
• nested institutions
• property rights
• tourism participation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and their help in improving the quality of our manuscript. We would also like to acknowledge and thank all the students in our group for their contributions and related discussions during our weekly group meetings. Furthermore, we sincerely appreciate the students from Professor Li Wenjun’s lab for their fieldwork assistance. Finally, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to the local guide and herders who have dedicated their time and effort to our fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The “separating three property rights” (STPR) is a new land tenure reform policy initiative introduced to agricultural regions in 2016, and wider applications of this reform policy have been implemented in pastoral regions since 2021. This reform policy stipulates three types of property rights: non-tradable ownership (generally by the state), non-tradable contracted rights, and tradable land management rights.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Youth Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (under the grant 71703126), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (under the grant JBK2101035), and partly supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (under the grant 17BMZ037).