Empowerment’s Influence on Resident Support for Tourism in rural Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

Rural sustainable tourism within CEE has been a promising diversification strategy and a relatively easily accessible means for rural households to achieve independence from the agriculture. Despite empowerment being a crucial component of this type of tourism few scholars have looked at how empowerment applies to rural societies within the post-communist EU member states. There has been some evidence of empowerment in the tourism context in those countries through exploratory studies, but they expose only some issues related to the implementation of participatory mechanisms in tourism decision-making and they are qualitative in nature. To further discuss the applicability of empowerment within CEE socio-political conditions, more research is needed to examine how residents perceive empowerment and how these perceptions relate to other core tourism constructs such as support for tourism. With this gap in mind, the first goal of this study is to test the cross-cultural validity of the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale (RETS) within the CEE country of Poland. The second goal is to evaluate how empowerment predicts residents’ support for tourism within a CEE context. Using a theoretical perspective that blends Social Exchange Theory with Weber’s Theory of Formal and Substantive Rationality, these non-economic empowerment dimensions will be coupled with a measure of resident perceptions of economically benefiting from tourism to see if Polish residents are more influenced by the economic benefits of tourism or the non-economic constructs of empowerment

Fair or Unfair: A study on Polish Leader participants in the context of tourism decision-making

The Leader framework developed by the European Commission (2000) was employed in response to rural unemployment and migration to urban areas. Leader aimed at incorporating new forms of governance at the local level by creating a legal basis for cross-sectoral partnerships and fostering stakeholder interaction and public participation. The establishment of Local Action Groups in Poland, however, does not warrant the effectiveness of their stakeholders’ participation. Perceived fairness has been recognized as a required precondition for individuals’ support for decisions and meaningful involvement in decision-making processes. The primary goal of this paper is to explore the basis of entitlement beliefs that selected Leader participants in Poland use to judge fairness and their participatory behavior in response to issues of fairness of tourism decision-making processes and distribution of Leader benefits

Resident connection to nature and attitudes towards tourism : findings from three different rural nature tourism destinations in Poland

Despite the growing literature arguing for the consideration of community perspectives in tourism destination governance, little is understood about how residents' connection to nature affects their perceptions of and responses to tourism. This is especially relevant for rural areas rich in nature as many of them have become refugees for urban dwellers seeking recreation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study combines the Nature's Contributions to People framework and Weber's Theory of Formal and Substantive Rationality to shed light on how rural residents of three nature-based tourism destinations connect with nature and how this connection to nature affects perceptions of empowerment from tourism and ultimately support for tourism. Results provide credence to the importance of including measures of residents' connections to nature when examining attitudes towards tourism in nature areas with connections to nature having significant and positive influences on psychological empowerment and social empowerment at all three destinations and direct and positive effects on support for tourism across two of the three destinations. Furthermore, results suggest that understanding the role nature connection plays in how residents perceive changes within their community can help manage locally emerging conflicts within rural tourism-dependent communities

Measuring Resident Perceptions of Economically Benefiting from Tourism

At the core of the resident attitudes literature is the general understanding that the more residents benefit financially from tourism, the more they tend to support it. While this relationship is a central tenet of the resident attitude literature, previous research has approached the measurement of resident perceptions of economically benefiting from tourism rather haphazardly using four disparate directions without a common reliable and valid scale. With this in mind, this study seeks to develop the Economic Benefit from Tourism Scale (EBTS). The scale’s development follows Churchill’s (1979) recommendations for scale development and uses three separate data collections across the United States of America and Poland to purify the scale and demonstrate its reliability and validity within an international context. Results from the confirmatory factor analyses confirm the EBTS’ international validity. Suggestions for how to include the scale within future data collections to strengthen Social Exchange Theory are presented

Community participation and empowerment in sustainable rural development in Poland

The proposed article seeks to identify forms and quality of participation in the EU context based on the example of the LEADER development framework and European Ecological Network - the NATURA 2000. The discussion about the character of community participation is framed within the model of stakeholders' participation proposed by Arnstein (1969). This model identifies different stages of citizens' participation linked to their real impact on decision-making

Self-efficacy mechanism at work : the context of environmental volunteer travel

This article contributes the first utilization of Bandura’s self-efficacy (SE) mechanism in the context of environmental volunteer travel demonstrating how environmental stewardship, hedonic experience, and environmental SE relate to one another in this particular settin

Effectiveness of Nature Conservation - A Case of Natura 2000 Sites in Poland

This book chapter examines problems emerging due to the designation of protected areas as well as implementation and management of the Natura 2000 in Poland