Community Sufficiency Economy Readiness for Sustainable Agriculture and Tourism Development

Abstract

The objective of the research is to study the readiness of the agricultural and tourism community towards sustainable development. The study focuses on agriculture and tourism communities in Thailand that applied Sufficiency Economy Philosophy (SEP) in their development. The research prioritized the important of factors that identify community readiness in every region of Thailand. An empirical study in both quantitative and qualitative was conducted by interviewing selected persons and experts to develop the questionnaire for data collection. The respondents of the study were 12 outstanding community leaders in agriculture and tourism and 602 villagers from 251 communities in every region of Thailand. The survey questionnaire was constructed for the study and tested for reliability, which hold good reliability with Cronbach alpha value at .968. Statistical tools used for the study are Mean, Standard deviation and One-way ANOVA. The results indicated 16 community readiness dimensions. The prioritized important level indicates 8 dimensions in high level and another 8 dimensions in moderate level. The comparison of important level by regions show different opinion towards community readiness dimensions. These findings are valuable and benefit to the communities as they are the community health check for Sufficiency Economy Readiness.