Community-Based Tourism: Challenges, Strategies, and a Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Development

Abstract

Community-Based Tourism (CBT) is an emerging approach to tourism development that emphasizes the active and meaningful participation of local communities in managing tourism resources, with the aim of ensuring sustainable, equitable, and culturally grounded development. This study identifies the key challenges, opportunities, and strategic requirements for CBT through a qualitative approach and documentary analysis. By focusing on essential components such as socio-economic justice, local empowerment, and environmental sustainability, the multidimensional nature of CBT is explored. The findings reveal that centralized governance, infrastructural inadequacies, limited financial capacity, tokenistic participation, inequitable benefit distribution, and weak stakeholder coordination are among the major barriers to CBT development. To address these challenges, strategies such as community education, delegation of authority to local institutions, infrastructure enhancement, justice-oriented policymaking, and improved multi-stakeholder collaboration are proposed. Furthermore, the comparative analysis of successful and unsuccessful CBT experiences in Iran and other countries highlights the necessity of designing frameworks rooted in genuine participation, the mobilization of indigenous capacities, and long-term commitment to sustainability principles. These insights provide practical implications for policy, planning, and management of community-based tourism initiatives.