Community-driven social responsibility: A framework for tourism SMEs

Abstract

The growing need for socially responsible actions by tourism SMEs, especially in remote and rural areas with limited resources, can result in holistic sustainability of communities. Finland’s national strategy and UN SDGs emphasize shared responsibility and benefits of tourism actors, although there are no practical ways to on how to engage local communities in shaping an SME’s social responsibility actions. The study focuses on communities in which the commissioner operates with an objective to understand community perceptions and expectations on social responsibility; identify priorities, contributions, existing and poten-tial ways of engagement and develop a community-driven social responsibility plan for the commissioner. Community-based re-search, where a pilot survey and semi structured interviews of the community were followed up with one Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) representative interview to explore institutional perspective on social responsibility and community engagement. While the results show that com-munity plays a central role in shaping SME’s actions of responsibility, there are resource constraints that severely limit community participation. A community-driven social responsibility plan was developed for the commissioner, with steps to map, identify, engage, co-create and iterate social responsibility actions. The same was adapted to draw general recommendations for other SMEs to develop social responsibility actions that add to community resilience and sense of place.