From resources to resourcefulness practices: How community agency shapes divergent rural community development in heritage tourism

Rural communities within the same heritage tourism destination often produce divergent development outcomes despite sharing identical institutional conditions. This paper examines this divergence through a comparative ethnographic study of three villages within the Kaiping Diaolou and Villages UNESCO World Heritage site in China, drawing on 4 years of embedded participant observation. Integrating Entrepreneurial Resourcefulness with Social Practice Theory and community agency, we identify the interpretive and practice-level mechanisms through which resource-constrained communities enact distinct development trajectories. The findings reveal three characteristic resourcefulness configurations, each shaped by a distinct internal organizational logic: a market-driven configuration of legitimacy-backed centralization; a resilience-driven configuration of progressive decentralization; and an externally constrained configuration of agency. The study advances ER theory by demonstrating that developmental divergence reflects not unequal resource endowments but unequal resourcefulness practice, and that the internal power architecture of collective ER translates shared structural conditions into divergent outcomes.