Local impacts of creative tourism initiatives

Creative tourism in Thailand was initiated using a participatory community-based approach to achieve a better quality of life for local communities. This chapter synthesizes extensive information on impact evaluations and indicators that can be applicable to measure various aspects of social, economic, and environmental sustainability at a community level. Incorporating the existing approaches with lessons learned from a pilot project in six designated areas in Thailand, an integrated monitoring system called ‘Linkages and Leakages' has been developed. The aim of this Community Benefitting through Creative Tourism (CBCT) model was to map out impacts and benefits from end to end across the entire creative tourism value chain. A comprehensive and local friendly tool was leveraged by multi-stakeholders' co-creation and facilitated by the Designated Areas for Sustainable Tourism Administration (DASTA). It has been designed as a locally owned and led process for monitoring, managing, and enhancing the sustainability of creative tourism initiatives. Three intertwined sustainable dimensions – articulating an ecologically, socio-culturally, and economically sustainable and equitable environment – enable community leaders to delineate the need for empowerment and capacity-building programmes, local sourcing strategies, and starting up community enterprises and their social capital-building structures (social networks and trust).