The willingness–capability model: Reframing local participation in a tourism economy

This paper rethinks local participation in tourism by introducing the Willingness–Capability model, which conceptualises participation as a dynamic interplay between individuals' desire to engage and their substantive ability to do so. Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Houhai Village, China, the study maps diverse participation trajectories across four quadrants of the Willingness–Capability framework. It reveals how participation is shaped not only by resources or governance, but also by cultural values, identity, and structural conditions. Challenging normative and aggregate models of “community involvement”, the Willingness–Capability model offers a nuanced, diagnostic lens for understanding engagement, exclusion, and refusal within tourism economies, and for theorising participation as an evolving alignment between agency and structure under changing socio-economic conditions. • Introduces a Willingness-Capability model of local participation in tourism • Maps participation as a dynamic interplay of agency and structural conditions • Reveals four distinct patterns of engagement, exclusion, and strategic withdrawal • Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Chinese surf village • Offers a diagnostic tool for rethinking participation beyond normative or ladder models