POTENTIALIZATION OF "COMMUNITY INTEREST" THROUGH THE PARTICIPATION OF COMMUNITY-BASED TOURISM COOPERATIVES IN TERRITORIAL PUBLIC GOVERNANCE: AN ANALYSIS IN PARATY/RJ

Community-Based Tourism (CBT) is a tourism management mode led by community members through associative and cooperative practices that prioritize the interests of communities. Despite these characteristics, the achieve of CBT’s goals has been limited when there is little interaction with other territorial actors, which can be improved by its inclusion in Territorial Public Governance (TPG). Based on this issue and the gap in the literature on the subject, this article aims to analyze how the participation of CBT in TPG can enhance the implementation of the cooperative principle of “interest in the community”. The investigation was carried out through a qualitative and exploratory case study in the territory of Paraty/RJ – which has a well-established CBT and is open to participating in local tourism governance. Data collection involved direct observation and documentary research, with subsequent thematic content analysis. The results indicated that the inclusion of CBT in TPG potentializes the cooperative principle of “interest in the community” by: making community representatives participate in key decisions for the territory’s tourism; increasing the capacity to defend community interests and proposals for tourism in the territory; facilitating community monitoring of public tourism policies for the territory; and obtaining the support of other territorial actors to carry out tourism actions that benefit communities. Thus, this work contributes to substantiating the importance of CBT's role in collective territorial management and advances the understanding of how cooperativism can be strengthened by community insertion in these spaces.