Under the Volcano: Responses of a community-based tourism village to the 2010 eruption of Mount Merapi, Indonesia

Abstract

This paper assesses the responses of community-based tourism (CBT) and local governments to natural disasters. The tourism community in rural areas that are at high risk of natural disasters is largely overlooked in the literature on tourism and disaster management. It can be argued that CBT management is vulnerable to such natural disasters and, therefore, its presence should be considered in the recovery process. Time series observations and in-depth interviews were performed in Pentingsari village on the slopes of Mount Merapi, a stratovolcano in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The findings show that the local government's preparation plans were focused only on disaster management, in general, and that it had only reactive programmes for tourism recovery. Moreover, CBT was able to respond and recover from the disaster by transforming the tourism destination with support from external agencies. In other words, it is concluded that transformation of the destination, organization, and human and community factors have taken place in the community-based tourism that leads to the post-disaster resilience.