The Role of Public Trust in Fostering Residents’ Support for Tourism Development: Evidence from a Portuguese Historic Town

Efficient governance is necessary to achieve sustainability, and the association between the local public sector and local communities is a vital element to dynamize in order to obtain a democratic planning process. In this context, evidence recommends that public trust is vital in explaining residents’ support of tourism development initiatives. This study investigates the drivers of residents’ support for tourism development (STD), putting the emphasis on the relevance of residents’ trust in the government institutions that are involved in tourism planning and development. This research proposes a conceptual framework to explore the connections between community attachment, inhabitants’ assessment of the effectiveness of management by local governments, people’s trust in government agencies and citizens´ STD. A survey of 150 people living in a small, historically significant town in the Douro Valley – a UNESCO World Heritage Site– was used to empirically test the proposed model. The model was estimated through the structural equation modelling (SEM) method. The findings indicate that there is a correlation between community attachment and public trust. Likewise, community attachment significantly predicted residents´ STD. The results also indicate that the management of tourism by local authorities had a considerable impact on the trust of the people in government organizations, but did not have a significant and direct effect on the STD of the inhabitants. The implications of these findings for theory and practice, the limitations of the study, and suggestions for future research directions were discussed in light of the results.