Meet Dwi Sugiharti

Dwi Sugiharti is currently undertaking her PhD in Economics under the supervision of Associate Professors Taha Chaiechi and Josephine Pryce at the College of Business, Law and Governance. She completed her Confirmation of Candidature Seminar in 2021 and her Mid-Candidature in 2022. She has published three papers; (1) Community-based tourism (CBT) in villages surrounding Borobudur Temple in Central Java and an inclusive and sustainable path to 2030 Agenda https://www.cauthe2020.org/
(2) The role of visitor’s resilience in understanding tourism resilience: a conceptual framework https://forumgroup.eventsair.com/cauthe2021/ and (3) The Application of Netnography as a Tool for Understanding Visitors’ Resilience: The Case of Villages in Central Java https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5260-8_17

As a development planner working for the government of Indonesia, Dwi was in charge of setting up the five-year development framework on Tourism Sector for Central Java province before coming to Cairns. Her research discusses the socio-economic impacts of CBT programs implementation in the twenty villages surrounding the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Borobudur Temple in Central Java province.

“Tourism not only generates revenue for industries directly involved in providing the services, but it can also be the engine to drive the development of other sectors. Central Java province holds a substantial supply of local content to attract potential visitors, enabling this sector to contribute to the economy and society.”

“As the most visited tourist destination in Central Java province, Borobudur temple has been a magnet to attract visitors to come 

to the region. Optimising the tourism sector while facing budget constraints is most likely to be done by empowering the host community to participate in tourism activities through CBT.”

Dwi explained that the central government has built a Rural Economic Centre or Balai Ekonomi Desa (Balkondes) in each village which functions as an interconnecting community-based tourism system to empower local people. The close proximity of the 20 villages to the temple demonstrates how they could support the tourism sector by providing the local population with the opportunities to get involved with the community based tourism industry. Strategically, all stakeholders in those 20 villages can plan more tourist attractions to lengthen the tourists’ stay.

The COVID-19 Pandemic gave Dwi the idea to add another focus to her research. During the lockdown, she noticed that numerous tourism destinations were collapsing due to the substantial drops in visitations. Visitors are a key stakeholder in the tourism industry and she started to conduct research on visitors’ resilience. Previously, visitors’ resilience had been neglected in studies on tourism resilience, even though the industry was largely dependent on visitors’ adaptability.

“As each of the different stakeholder groups has its own approach to dealing with external risks and potential system failures, each group’s characteristic, adaptability, and absorbability should be studied proportionately. Hence, the combined individual, social and economic contexts of resilience in building the resilience of tourism systems is suggested.”