Prioritizing Empowerment through Importance Performance Analysis

While there is near unanimous agreement that for tourism to be considered sustainable, residents need to be empowered, few have asked residents which dimensions of empowerment should be prioritized. This research note fills this gap through conducting an Importance Performance Analysis of the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale within the nature-based tourism destination of Brevard, NC, USA. Results found residents to be generally apathetic towards empowerment with psychological, social, political, and economic empowerment all falling in the “Low Priority” quadrant when using a scale-centered approach. However, when using the data-centered technique, “Economic Empowerment” and “Political Empowerment” fell into the “Concentrate Here” quadrant with “Social Empowerment” landing in the “Possible Overkill” quadrant, and “Psychological Empowerment” landing in the “Keep up the Good Work” quadrant. If researchers and practitioners really care about empowering residents, more research is needed to identify resident priorities and benchmark how well destinations are performing on those priorities.