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Sustainable development may best be achieved by enhancing the commitment of local communities. Stewart and Hams (1991) argue that the requirements of sustainable development cannot merely be imposed but that active participation by local communities is needed. However, the terms ‘community’, ‘host community’ and ‘participation’ can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Before entering a full discussion of host community participation in tourism planning, it is first necessary to explore the various potential interpretations of these terms and to define their meaning and function. This chapter therefore clarifies some of the issues surrounding the terms community, host, host community and participation. The major typologies and available models in relation to host communities’ participation in sustainable planning for tourism are also reviewed.

There have been various concerns about the petroleum industry regulation in Nigeria, including issues regarding the protection of host communities. The host communities have hardly derived sustainable developmental value from petroleum resource exploration from their community. Instead, the exploration of petroleum and other mineral resources has caused some environmental, social and economic setback for these host communities. On 17 August 2021, the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021 was signed into law after over two decades of legislative stalemate. The PIA proposes a series of reforms purported to revolutionalise the petroleum industry. According to President Buhari, the Act will create a regulatory sphere that will ensure transparency and accountability across the oil and gas value chain (Ailemen, 2021). Chapter 3 of the Act deals with host communities' concerns. Its overall aim is to ensure host communities have access to sustainable prosperity. The notion of sustainable prosperity implies that the Act seeks to elevate host communities from the poverty baseline to a level of prosperity that satisfies the social, economic, environmental and intergenerational features. Therefore, this chapter examines the provisions of the Act, particularly Chapter 3, to determine its potential to achieve sustainable prosperity for host communities. The chapter shall also identify the weaknesses in the Act, which would otherwise limit its sustainable prosperity goal and how these challenges can be addressed.

This paper explores some gendered impacts of resettlement in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lesotho, Southern Africa, I use a feminist political ecology framework to analyze the ways host and settler communities negotiate development-induced resettlement and how resettlement conditions (re)produce gendered social interests in the context of the LHWP. While material losses are typically compensated during resettlement, the non-material, psycho-social aspects of loss do not get compensated. After resettlement, however, it is the unpaid, uncompensated community work of women that offers opportunities for adjustment into the new communities.

International service-learning (ISL) programs are proliferating in American colleges. Usually the stakeholders involved (colleges, local host communities, and nonprofit organizations) undertake a single or few projects, such as housing construction, in a host country from a few weeks to months during an academic year. In most ISL programs, national governments of the host countries are not participants. Using a case study, this chapter shows how an American college can collaborate with a foreign national government to implement an ISL partnership. The case study involves the ISL partnership between North Carolina Central University and the Liberia Civil Service Agency. The students are from the Executive Master of Public Administration program that requires students to complete at least two weeks of service in government agencies in a developing country. Students are therefore provided the opportunity to gain valuable experience working on projects in Liberian government agencies, while the University provides research and policy analysis for the agencies. The diversity of projects in various agencies provides students the opportunity to gain experience in government administration in Liberia, thereby broadening their knowledge and education. A single ISL project administered by a nonprofit organization may not provide such opportunities.

International students face challenges when they attend a university outside their home country. Some of those challenges can be language barriers, expectations of professors, university rules and living situation. All of these can add strain to an already stressful situation of studying abroad. Student integration into a local society can offset some of the anxiety of studying overseas (Mattis, 2019). Students who have made friends are comfortable living within the locale in which they are studying and have reported more satisfaction than those students who have not integrated into a local society (Fischer, 2012). This chapter will study the ways in which students should work to integrate themselves into the local society and how the university and professors can help international students find a way to become familiar and content within the local society. Learning the regional language, culture and social activities help enhance the student’s satisfaction.

Independent actors operating through peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms co-create service experiences, such as shared car-rides or home-stays. Emotional labor among both parties, manifested in the mutual enactment of socially desirable behavior, is essential in ensuring that these experiences are successful. However, little is known about emotional labor practices and about how sharing economy platforms enforce emotional labor practices among independent actors, such as guests, hosts, drivers, or passengers. To address this research gap, we follow a mixed methods approach. We combine survey research among Airbnb and Uber users with content analysis of seven leading sharing economy platforms. The findings show that (1) users perform emotional labor despite not seeing is as necessarily desirable and (2) platforms actively encourage the performance of emotional labor practices even in the absence of direct formal control. Emotional labor practices are encouraged through (hard) design features such as mutual ratings, reward systems, and gamification, as well as through more subtle (soft) normative framing of desirable practices via platform and app guidelines, tips, community sites, or blogs. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of the limitations of peer-to-peer sharing platforms, where control over the service experience and quality can only be enforced indirectly.

The chapter presents a critical analysis of the reception system for non-asylum seeking unaccompanied migrant children in Calabria, a region of South Italy. It focuses on the main features of local welfare for migrants’ children emerging from a qualitative research carried out by mixing different sources: analysis of literature and semi-structured interviews to different stakeholders (politician, local administrators, juvenile judges, social workers, management of foster-care communities, and educators). Shortages in individualized planning, lack of resources for qualifying the educational staff, economic difficulties of local administrators, frequent absence of a cultural and linguistic mediator, lengthy delays in appointing tutelary judge, weakness of social territorial services to support communities, difficulties in organizing training and creating job opportunities, lack of verification and monitoring of inclusion interventions, organizational isolation of reception communities, fragility of networking and sporadic collaboration among different stakeholders involved in protection system, and inadequate collection of data and information about migrant children hosted in foster-care communities are salient limits of the local policies and interventions for non-asylum seeking migrants’ children. The chapter also includes a brief presentation of latest innovation in this policies filed, highlighting some of the best practices in education, training, and employment conducted in the Protection System for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, better organized, more specialized, and supported by the national government.

Purpose – This chapter analyzes two environmental conflicts in Southeast Michigan. It analyzes how activists in each community framed each conflict and what factors prevented the groups from collaborating.

Design/methodology/approach – This essay uses a multi-method approach. Researchers used participant observation, interviews, and archival information gleaned from government documents and newspapers.

Findings – Both community groups had a common opponent – a corporation that had closed its facilities in a predominantly black, low-income urban community and relocated it to a predominantly white, middle-class, rural community. Both communities had complaints about pollution, yet they did not collaborate with each other in their campaigns against the corporation.

Originality/value – The essay blends two theoretical approaches – social movement and conflict theories – to help in the assessment of how the conflicts unfolded and why collaboration between activists in the two communities did not occur. This is one of the first attempts to analyze environmental justice conflicts from this perspective.

Migrants and refugees from around the world flee to European countries to avoid situations of hardship, persecution and violence. The integration of refugees and migrants is a challenging issue. Despite diffused cosmopolitan attitudes and internationalized aspirations, people are often negatively predisposed against migrants and refugees. There are many cultural barriers to overcome in order to reduce tensions between foreign cultures and host communities.

The integration of migrants embraces immigrants' willingness and openness to learn and adapt their attitudes to the host environment; on the other hand, natives must also be prepared to accept the changes that immigrants can bring.

Digital technology can support the process of integration, providing access to online language learning programmes and health-related services, or offering opportunities to gather information and socialize. However, whilst the same digital technologies are shared by migrants and host communities, different processes of technology appropriation can limit their benefits for refugees' and migrants' integration.

This chapter focuses on digital social innovation (DSI) and the social inclusion of migrants and refugees. It also analyzes how innovative digital solutions can overcome ambivalence concerning cultural diversity. Integration should foster pluralism but, at the same time, should preserve cultural identity and linguistic diversity as well as improve economic and social participation.

The first step is designing DSI solutions avoiding the stereotype that immigrants are a homogeneous social group. Digital technology can support the implementation of multi-context applications whilst the information society may be the common cultural environment shared by all. This chapter also illustrates some relevant digitally based initiatives developed in Italy.

Considering the economic potential of festivals to Creative Tourism, this chapter discusses the potential of the small-scale ones for rural development. It reviews worldwide small-scale festivals and engages them with creative activities, presenting the results of some of the small-scale festivals that occur in Southern Europe. It explores the impacts of a small-scale festival on the development of a medium-sized city or a rural area and the challenges they must face in the future. Furthermore, it deals with what kind of new offer can be developed in order to make these territories more sustainable. In this context, Southern Europe plays an important role due to its rich historical heritage that can diversify the offer and the type of experience, being an excellent opportunity to promote the preservation of those at risk of disappearing. This chapter uses primary and secondary data. A geodatabase was created to understand South European festivals on Creative Tourism. Examples from Italy, Greece, Slovenia and Portugal were analysed.