The Role of Community Empowerment on Sustainable Eco-Friendly Resort Development: A Case Study of Kandalama Residents in Sri Lanka

Tourism is associated with economic, environmental, and socio-cultural benefits, which can contribute to revitalization of communities and enhancement of residents’ quality of life (Andereck & Nyaupane, 2010). When examining residents’ support for eco-friendly tourism development, community empowerment plays a major role since, in order to achieve successful sustainable tourism development, community leaders and developers need to view tourism as a “community industry” that enables residents to be actively involved in determining and planning future tourism development with the overall goal of improving residents’ quality of life (Franzoni, 2015). In Sri Lanka, there are many eco-friendly tourist hotels which pay more attention to tourist attractions and paying less attention to community. However, the hotel cannot be sustained without the community support. Therefore, while examining the residents’ support for eco-friendly tourism, this study extends the existing residents’ support model in the literature by testing the empowerment scales suggested by Scheyvens (1999), using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) through AMOS. The results revealed that the empowerment scales in eco-friendly resort development in Sri Lanka are valid, and community empowerment plays an important role in gaining community support for the eco-friendly resort development.