Community Participation As An Ecotourism Enabler: Evidence From Peliatan, Bali

Abstract

Ecotourism development frameworks commonly treat evaluation criteria as independent, parallel entities, overlooking the dynamic interdependencies among them. This assumption carries practical consequences, when criteria are isolated as standalone units, their cascading effects on one another remain invisible to planners and policymakers. Peliatan Village in Ubud, Bali, presents a compelling empirical case in which community participation demonstrably drives outcomes across higher-weighted criteria a relationship that existing frameworks have not yet articulated. This study aims to examine whether community participation, positioned third in an AHP-derived expert hierarchy, functions as an enabling criterion that underpins the realisation of the two highest-weighted criteria: environment (0.281) and socio-culture (0.210). Two complementary datasets were integrated, an AHP-weighted ecotourism criteria hierarchy generated from assessments by 15 cross-disciplinary experts, and empirical data on community participation in Peliatan Village. Inter-criteria relational analysis was applied to trace causal patterns within the data. Findings confirm that community participation (weight: 0.168) operates as an enabling criterion in practice. In Peliatan, initiatives spanning river management across four focal points, waste programmes (PEGO, TEKI), the one-million-biopore campaign, the Puspa Aman programme, preservation of 237 hectares of rice fields across 12 subak, and revival of the meanyud-anyudan ritual collectively enabled improvements in both environmental and socio-cultural outcomes achievements culminating in Peliatan's recognition as the highest-scoring village in Indonesia's 2018 Village Development Index (IDM). These findings challenge conventional hierarchy-based planning and propose a reorientation toward enabling criteria sequencing in ecotourism development.