Harmonic Tourism Methodology: A proposal for tourism planning in rural communities

Over the last few years, complex systems and insights from planning theory have gained momentum in tourism planning and local community development. Resilience and vulnerability are structural properties of complex systems and have started to stretch from ecology to the wider domain of social sciences, including into tourism and development. Hence, the need arises to design and implement embedded models that encourage tourism projects rooted in the know-how of communities and their interrelation with institutional knowledge and third-order change. This chapter presents and applies the Harmonic Tourism Methodology as an alternative for community-based and community-led tourism planning. The methodology considers the interplay of rational and traditional knowledge emanating from a diagnosis of a complex system as the basis of community tourism projects. Two subsystems (biophysicist and anthropic) are acknowledged in the methodology, as environmental and socio-ecological embeddedness are at the heart of livelihoods. Data was collected from key stakeholders, the research community and a review of rational information through a multiscalar longitudinal perspective. The methodology was applied in four communities in Mexico and one community in Colombia. NVivo qualitative software was used to allow the interrelation of the vernacular-rational knowledge. This chapter concludes that the Harmonic Tourism Methodology can be an alternative territorial tourism planning that allows communities to adapt to system vulnerabilities and resilience in recovering and preserving natural and cultural resources for future generations.