Tourism and Community Well-Being: An Applied Approach

This study utilized a grounded, inductive framework to explore the relationship between tourism and the well-being of communities through the integration of three complimentary planning and strategy exercises. Attendees of a regional tourism development conference in Queensland, Australia participated in a “Futures Wheel, Appreciative Inquiry, and Make It Fail” exercise. This was part of a workshop hosted by researchers interested in understanding the current and future relationship between tourism and community well-being. In order to provide parameters for the three-step exercise, Flora’s community capitals framework was applied as a means of identifying components of a community that contribute to its well-being. These exercises benefitted both practitioners and researchers seeking to understand how stakeholders perceive tourism’s impacts on community well-being. This paper demonstrates how the exercises were applied in a workshop setting and presents limited findings based on the analysis of a portion of the data