Community-based ecotourism (CBET) provides benefits to society members, especially concerning to the environment, by giving them the opportunity to influence and participate in the development of tourism. Lorestan province in the west of Iran is influenced by this phenomenon by having specific CBET opportunities in different economic, social, environmental and physical dimensions. The purpose of this study was to develop a sustainable community-based ecotourism (SCBET) model using the qualitative content analysis (with a deductive method in the form of the Hartmut model). The documents used included a systematic study of 45 international articles, 12 local articles, 2 books and in-depth interviews with 11 local experts. The results showed that the crystallization of CBET can be formed in the form of a four-component model (including planning, implementation, evaluation and situation analysis). In this model, four stages of the process of implementing community-based tourism (CBT) have been presented, in all of which the participation of researchers, ecotourists, policymakers and local people have been of great importance. Finally, the extracted categories for CBET sustainability were matched with the standards of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) (including sustainable management, cultural sustainability, socio-economic sustainability and environmental sustainability) and the final SCBET model was presented. This model can be useful for policy makers for decision-making and planning in the SCBET field.
Keywords: Community-based ecotourism; Lorestan; Participation; Sustainability; Tourism.
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