Building Community Resilience and Adaptive Capacity Through Investments in Tourism and Conservation

This study applies human ecology theory to examine community resilience and adaptive capacity in a nature-based tourism destination. Data were collected through a survey of 207 residents in Corrientes, Argentina in communities where internationally recognized efforts to drive tourism, protect large landscapes, and restore natural resources have taken place. The results of the analysis revealed six domains of community resilience through a confirmatory factor analysis and illustrated that tourism and conservation investments increase tourism involvement, which leads to direct and indirect paths of increases in community resilience and adaptive capacity. Multivariate relationships were detected between tourism involvement and four of the six identified community resilience domains, and between tourism involvement and adaptive capacity through three community resilience domains acting as mediating variables. Using human ecology theory as a framework, this study provides insights into how communities’ adaptive capacity develops through residents’ engagement in entrepreneurial and self-organization opportunities offered by tourism.