Community capacity building: lessons from Miso Walai Homestay

This paper emphasizes the importance of community capacity building towards sustaining community based tourism. The literature review reveals that the main constraint of sustainable community based tourism development particularly in the rural areas revolve around community capacity building. Lack of awareness and general knowledge about tourism are seen as the main factor that contributes to the failure of the community based tourism development. Community empowerment serves as a fundamental to enable active participation in tourism development at the community level. In addition, local leadership and organization are important components in community capacity building that play vital roles in the success of community based tourism. Limited community capacity will lead to external domination of local tourism development. As a result, local community gains only minimum benefits from tourism development. Therefore, building community capacity becomes critical in order to ensure the success of community based tourism. The concept of community capacity building is widely used for community development in the field of health, agriculture and education. However, limited literature discusses about the community capacity building in the field of tourism development. Thus, this paper will explore the concept of community capacity building in the context of tourism development; the evolution of community capacity building; and the dynamic process of community capacity building according to tourism development stages. The formulation of community capacity building to cater the development and evolution of community based tourism becomes an interesting aspect to focus due to the dynamic nature of community capacity. The inability of a community to be involved in tourism development and react towards business environment changes will be detrimental to the growth of community based tourism programme. A community based tourism programme - Miso Walai Homestay located at Kinabatangan, Sabah, Malaysia is chosen to illustrate the contextual setting of the discussions and debates for community capacity building in this paper