The Influence of Community Participation Factors on Environmental Behavior in Island Tourism

Abstract

Sustainable island tourism relies on values in which social behavior often involves social exchanges where people are motivated to attain some valued reward that forfeits value (cost) on how community and environmental behavior coevolve. This is a conceptual paper to study the effects of community participation factors on environmental behavior in island tourism. The paper goes on to analyze three factors that play a role in community participation behavior (CPB). The study uses generation factors as proxies to capture and addresses factors that influence people in everyday lives at place-based studies. These relationships are yet to underpin by Social Exchange Theory (SET) and the confidence in the predictive power of such community participation at island tourism remains low. The generalizability of SET theory, therefore, requires major advances in incorporating more realistic relationships, underpinned by appropriate social exchange and social-science data and theories. The latter is a critical input since community participation – especially social exchange arising from it – influences the behavior and consequences of behaviors. This paper reviews the social exchange that links community participation factors to influence community environmental behavior at island tourism. This study will discuss in relation to the theory of social exchange as the underpinning theory. The theory also discusses adopted community environmental behavior and the activation of the individual norms in community and tourist. The findings of the paper include the types of factors that play a role in community behavior (altruism, consciousness, and civic virtue behavior) and what factor appears to be the most influential. This conceptual paper is significant because it will explore a number of factors that affect the community’s behavior towards environmental conservation at island tourism.