1. Introduction
Over the past 30 years, rural tourism has gradually been considered as a powerful driving force for creating local job opportunities, alleviating absolute poverty, and promoting rural sustainable development in China. However, the tourism participation rate of rural households in poverty-stricken areas has remained low for a long time [
1,
2]. At the end of 2017, China’s President Xi Jinping first proposed to implement the “Rural Revitalization Strategy” in the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. In 2018, the “Guidance on Promoting the Sustainable Development of Rural Tourism” issued by the national Ministry of Culture and Tourism and 17 other departments of China, emphasized that rural tourism should “take rural residents as the main beneficiary, respect farmers’ willingness, focus on their participatory process, and further increase government’s support and assistance” in order to stimulate tourism employment. It means that rural tourism has been recognized as a feasible approach in subsequent rural revitalization strategy.
As a brand-new industrial poverty alleviation model, rural tourism plays a vital economic role, especially in impoverished areas with abundant tourism resources. However, in the context of China’s rural revitalization implementation, both the internal and external environments that affect rural households’ participation in tourism have gradually changed, particularly in poor areas. First, until recently, China’s rural tourism had reached a level of scale where it needed to be upgraded, which still faces challenges in the form of a single development mode, low level of industrial integration and bottlenecks in family income increases [
3]. Second, China’s rural population has been quite stratified due to its recent rapid urbanization. With large numbers of young rural laborers entering cities to seek employment opportunities, rural tourism has faced the problem of a lack of workers to take over [
4]. Those laborers who stayed in rural communities are mostly middle-aged and elderly groups, and the operation risk and unstable benefits of tourism employment [
3], and being marginalized due to limited assets or capabilities for some poorer ones [
5], may also decrease their willingness to participate in tourism. Third, during the targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) period that began in 2013, abundant policy assistance and action plans related to rural tourism have also brought new opportunities for households and tourism industry development [
6]. Given these new opportunities and challenges, it is necessary and worthy to explore the rural households’ willingness to participate in rural tourism, which determines how to sustain local residents’ livelihood and upgrade the rural tourism industry in China’s rural revitalization stage.
Many existing studies have focused on the willingness of households to participate in rural tourism [
4,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13]. Some scholars assessed the perceived impacts of rural tourism on residents’ willingness to participate in rural tourism by using the motivation, opportunity and ability (MOA) model [
14] or social representation theory [
4], which is mainly from an individual perception perspective. Another strand of most previous studies has focused on the role of livelihood assets in the behavioral choice of tourism participation with analysis based on the sustainable livelihood framework. This framework, which includes five types of livelihood capital, i.e., human, physical, social, financial and natural capital, holds that those with better livelihood capital endowments are more inclined to participate in tourism [
8,
15,
16,
17,
18]. However, one fact that these studies had ignored is that the capital approach tends to focus on the livelihood choice based only on present conditions and is not forward-looking. In practice, the acquisition and conversion of livelihood capital is a dynamic and changing process that is easily affected by an external and changeable environment [
19]. In addition, rural tourism exploitation can be a “double-edged sword” for destination communities. It not only can have major positive impacts on local residents [
20], but also can seriously disturb local livelihood systems in its initial stages. For instance, Biggs (2011) [
21] found that some farmland expropriated for tourism purposes could change traditional lifestyles and pressure rural ecological environments. Faced with these adverse conditions, farmers’ livelihoods must respond and undergo a positive or negative adaptation process through which the “feasible ability” to cope with shocks can gradually change over time [
19]. However, the question of how these changes affect willingness to participate in tourism remains unanswered.
In addition, a new research trend has emerged that focuses on the government’s role and the influence of policy in pushing residents to participate in rural tourism [
22,
23]. These studies have emphasized that without enough supportive policies, the locals in most cases can only enjoy a marginal share of the benefits from tourism development [
24] and also face participation barriers. Additionally, many scholars have focused on the willingness of all residents in rural areas and have not subdivided the populations into relevant groups. Given the household differentiation mentioned above, this does not seem to be an effective solution to identify the ideal subjects that rural tourism should cover and how to consolidate the achievements of poverty reduction through rural tourism during the TPA period in rural China.
In an effort to make up for this, we introduce the “livelihood resilience” approach to describe the “ability” generated from the dynamic adaptive process of rural tourism exploitation. Livelihood resilience research has recently emerged to address issues of how households can potentially adapt to environmental changes [
25]. It is a time-bound assessment of the state of a system that can be varied in response to new circumstances. Livelihood resilience can be understood as a “capacity” in accordance with the connotation of resilience, holding that it refers to the ability of a family to respond and adapt to socio-economic and environmental changes by restoring itself from disturbances, learning from changes, and restructuring life and production [
26]. Based on the impact of tourism exploitation on the destination community, we aim to use the concept of livelihood resilience to identify whether rural residents could change their ability insufficiency and show increased enthusiasm for tourism participation.
The objective of this study is to explore whether rural households are willing to participate in rural tourism under the internal drive of livelihood resilience (“push” factors) and incentive of tourism poverty alleviation policies (“pull” factors) under the context of China’s rural revitalization strategy. With regard to the specific participants and beneficiaries of rural tourism, patterns of local household participation include involvement in community tourism planning and operations and benefit distribution [
27]. This study focuses primarily on participation in tourism operation activities and employment in tourism enterprises, restaurants, and other supporting businesses. The potential contributions to the existing literature are as follows. First, compared with the livelihood capital assets approach, we introduce a “resilience” perspective to capture the capability mechanism of rural households that recovered from tourism exploitation and its possible effects on tourism participation willingness. Second, from the perspective of household perception and involvement, we examine whether poverty alleviation policies can become an attraction for households to participate in rural tourism. Third, we also subdivide the sample households into three types considering the possible differentiation of their willingness at the rural revitalization stage, which has been ignored by previous research.
6. Conclusions
This study aims to explore the determinant factors of rural households’ willingness to participate in rural tourism in impoverished areas in the context of China’s rural revitalization strategy. It also contributes significant value for other developing countries to develop rural tourism, expand community participation and achieve comprehensive poverty reduction. First, the empirical findings indicate that livelihood resilience can act as a positive “push” force to rural households’ willingness to participate in tourism. In particular, family housing conditions, labor, loan opportunities, and per capita income can enhance the buffer capacity of rural households and thereby increase their willingness. Social support networks that consist of relatives and friends, and frequent village public affairs participation are also beneficial to households’ self-organizing abilities and further increase willingness. For learning capacity, skills, training, and education levels of the household head have significant positive effects on willingness as well. Second, rural households with a better understanding of tourism poverty reduction policy and a more positive perception of tourism employment in their communities as well as more policy support items targeted to families have a more active willingness to engage in tourism. Third, these influencing factors varied among different household types. Farming-oriented households have the lowest willingness, followed by the migratory-oriented households, and tourism-participating ones have the highest. Buffer capacity is a significant driving force for the three types of household willingness. Positive poverty alleviation policy perception could attract migratory households to return to their hometowns to start tourism businesses; however, better self-organizing capacity decreased their willingness. For tourism-participating households, strong self-organizing and learning capacity, as well as positive policy perception and involvement, can incentivize them to continue to be willing to participate in tourism.
Several limitations of this study should be mentioned. First, in addition to the determinants from a household perspective as examined in this study, several external factors such as modes of tourism development, stakeholder relations in tourism communities and the type and attraction of scenic spots can also be addressed in further research. Second, resilience attributes with dynamics, time-bound, and temporal and spatial changes. However, we only chose the specific investigation time after a period of the tourism exploitation nearby communities, and use the cross-sectional survey to examine livelihood resilience in different livelihood adaptive strategies, which possibly cannot accurately capture the process of variation of livelihood resilience. Third, livelihood resilience and poverty alleviation factors might not be independent but combine together to play a role in enhancing willingness. For example, those with stronger resilience may have a more positive policy perception, or perhaps they have a better understanding of tourism poverty alleviation policies and assistance measures. Owing to the limitation of the research method and article length, this needs to be considered in further analysis.
Nevertheless, this study contributes to China’s ongoing efforts to encourage community tourism participation and identify the role of poverty reduction policy in stimulating household enthusiasm for rural tourism in poverty-stricken areas. Based on the research results, the following aspects should be promoted: a long-term livelihood resilience capacity building mechanism is essential and should be guaranteed in rural tourism communities, paying attention to the changes in participation willingness caused by livelihood resilience level improvement, such as livelihood capitals accumulation and skills acquisition. Moreover, household willingness differentiation should be noted, especially for those who have not yet participated in tourism but have strong willingness, and specific targeted policy support assistance to remedy their “short board” of endogenous resilience is indispensable. Lastly, it is necessary to keep poverty reduction policy continuity and publicity and policy implementation in accordance with household needs; more importantly, further investment should be strengthened to promote the sustainable development of rural tourism so as to increase the attractiveness of rural tourism employment.