Tourism relationship model and intermediary for sustainable tourism management: Case study of the Kiritappu Wetland Trust in Hamanaka, Hokkaido

This article proposes a simple model that depicts the relationship between community and extra-community stakeholders that will enable the effective development of sustainable tourism. 'Sustainable tourism' in this article is defined as tourism that utilizes community resources for tourism development and re-invests the returns from tourism to the destination resources based on the previous studies. The tourism relationship model, with a community-based intermediary as its sub-system, is introduced and applied to a case in Hokkaido, Japan. The application demonstrates that the model is a valid tool to identify two important factors for successful development of sustainable tourism, which are a 'circulation mechanism' that connects community resources and extra-community stakeholders through community-based intermediaries, and a 'balancing mechanism' that considers the existence value and economic value, supplemented by the community-based intermediary's functions to transfer financial capital from non-tourist sources.