A dimensional approach to community-based tourism: Recognising and differentiating form and context

•CBT uses tourism for community-centred development benefits.•Three-dimensions of CBT are involvement, power and control, and outcomes.•Dynamic contexts of CBT creation and development inform their investigation.•CBTEs move non-linearly within the three-dimensional CBT form as they develop.•Participants’ CBT outcomes are context-specific, locally defined and determined. In recent years there have been calls for greater recognition of context in response to the emergence of alternative forms of community-based tourism (CBT). In contrast, normative, even idealised, positions on CBT have also been articulated. We address this contractionist push by showing how a combination of formism and contextualism can be applied in CBT analysis. We contribute a transferable, three-dimensional framework to differentiate CBT forms and then apply and contextualise this framework through four case studies on the process of community-based tourism enterprise creation and development in Kenya. On the basis of this research, we encourage further exploration into innovative ways and mechanisms through which communities can partner and collaborate with other actors to meet locally-defined community development needs.