Fair Treatment, Not Just Fair Shares, Drives Residents to Co-Govern Tourism

When a city becomes a destination, the people who live there become part of the scenery. Their streets are walked by millions of strangers, their neighborhoods are photographed, their daily routines bend around the rhythms of the visitor economy. A new study from Wuxi, China, published in PLOS One, asks a deceptively simple question about that arrangement: what makes residents willing to roll up their sleeves and help govern tourism rather than simply endure it? The answer, according to survey data from 308 residents living near major attractions, turns out to be less about the size of the economic pie and more about whether people feel they are being treated fairly, heard, and respected — by the institutions that manage tourism and, strikingly, by the tourists themselves.

The research, conducted by Xiaoqing Jiang, is built around a concept that has gained traction in governance scholarship: co-governance participation intention, meaning a resident’s stated willingness to take part in collaborative decision-making about tourism in their community. This is not merely a matter of attending the occasional town meeting. In destinations under sustained tourism pressure, residents are increasingly invited — or expected — to share responsibility for managing crowding, protecting local heritage, mediating conflicts with visitors, and shaping the rules that determine who benefits from tourism and who bears its costs. Understanding what motivates that willingness is therefore central to whether collaborative governance actually works or remains a slogan on a planning document.

To probe the question, the study drew on organizational justice theory, which distinguishes three dimensions of fairness. Distributive justice concerns the perceived fairness of outcomes: whether the benefits and burdens of tourism — income, opportunity, congestion, noise, rising costs — are shared in ways residents consider equitable. Procedural justice concerns the fairness of the processes by which decisions are made: whether rule-making is transparent, consistent, and open to genuine resident voice. Interactional justice concerns the quality of interpersonal treatment: whether residents feel they are treated with dignity and respect by authorities, and, in this study’s framing, in the everyday encounters that tourism generates. The survey instrument measured residents’ perceptions across all three dimensions, alongside their emotional solidarity with tourists — feelings of warmth, welcome, and identification with visitors — and their intention to participate in co-governance.

Analyzing the data with structural equation modeling, the study found that all three dimensions of perceived justice were positively associated with both emotional solidarity and co-governance participation intention. In other words, residents who perceived tourism governance as fair — in its outcomes, its procedures, and its interpersonal treatment — reported stronger feelings of emotional connection with tourists and a greater willingness to engage in collaborative management. Notably, the associations for procedural and interactional justice were particularly strong. The fairness of how decisions are made, and the respect conveyed in day-to-day interactions, mattered at least as much as — and in these data, more saliently than — the distribution of material benefits alone.

This pattern challenges a persistent assumption in destination management: that keeping residents satisfied is primarily a matter of distributing tourism revenue, subsidies, jobs, or compensation. Those material flows certainly matter, and distributive justice did show a positive association with both emotional solidarity and participation intention. But the stronger signals from procedural and interactional justice suggest that residents evaluate tourism governance through a broader relational lens. A community meeting that genuinely solicits resident input, a complaint channel that actually responds, a tourism official who treats a local shopkeeper’s concerns as legitimate — these everyday experiences of fairness appear to feed directly into residents’ sense that co-governing tourism is worthwhile.

The study then tested a mediation pathway, asking whether emotional solidarity with tourists serves as a bridge between governance fairness and participation intention. The mediation analysis indicated a significant indirect association: perceived justice was linked to participation intention partly through residents’ emotional solidarity with visitors. This finding adds an intriguing psychological mechanism to the picture. Fair governance, it appears, does not only persuade residents that the system is legitimate; it also seems to soften the social boundary between hosts and guests. Residents who feel fairly treated become, in a measurable sense, warmer toward the tourists whose presence their governance must accommodate — and that warmth, in turn, is associated with a stronger intention to participate in managing tourism collectively.

The logic behind this pathway is worth unpacking, because it links two research literatures that have often run in parallel. Work on emotional solidarity in tourism, rooted in Durkheimian sociology and later formalized in host–guest relationship models, has shown that residents’ affective bonds with tourists influence their support for tourism development. Work on organizational justice has shown that fair treatment builds trust in institutions and willingness to cooperate with them. The Wuxi study connects the two: fairness in governance is not only institutional but relational, and its effects ripple outward from how residents regard their government to how they regard their guests. A resident who perceives that the tourism system treats her fairly may extend a presumption of goodwill to the visitors that system brings to her doorstep — and a resident who feels goodwill toward visitors has a richer emotional reason to help govern the destination than mere economic self-interest alone.

The study also examined whether perceived tourism pressure — the degree to which residents experience crowding, disruption, and strain from visitor numbers — changed these relationships. Here the results were more selective than one might expect. Perceived tourism pressure significantly moderated only one pathway: the association between interactional justice and emotional solidarity. It did not significantly moderate the associations for distributive or procedural justice. In practical terms, this suggests that respectful interpersonal treatment matters most, or works differently, when tourism pressure is high. When the streets are crowded and tempers are short, the quality of everyday encounters between hosts and guests — and between residents and those who govern tourism — becomes a more decisive factor in whether residents maintain emotional solidarity with visitors. Meanwhile, the links between distributive and procedural fairness and emotional solidarity appear comparatively robust across levels of tourism pressure, suggesting that these forms of fairness operate as a steadier foundation regardless of how heavy the visitor burden becomes.

For destination managers and municipal planners, the findings point toward a specific agenda. Transparent procedures, meaningful resident voice, and respectful everyday interactions are not soft extras bolted onto a tourism strategy; in this study they carry the strongest associations with residents’ willingness to co-govern. That has concrete implications for how participatory mechanisms are designed. Consultation exercises that exist to legitimize decisions already made are unlikely to build the kind of fairness perception that motivates engagement. What appears to matter is procedural authenticity — genuine opportunities for residents to influence outcomes — combined with interactional care in every point of contact between the tourism apparatus and the community it affects. The moderation results add a further nuance: as tourism pressure intensifies, investing in the quality of everyday interactions may become even more critical for preserving the emotional bonds that sustain collaborative governance.

The study’s scope and method frame how far its conclusions travel. It relies on cross-sectional survey data from 308 residents in one Chinese city, analyzed through structural equation modeling, mediation analysis, and hierarchical regression; the associations reported are just that — associations, not experimentally established causes. Emotional solidarity and participation intention are measured as perceptions and stated intentions rather than observed behavior, and residents of Wuxi’s major attraction areas may differ from those of other destinations in ways that shape the results. Still, the core contribution stands: collaborative tourism governance is not sustained by institutional design alone, nor by economic compensation alone, but by a relational fabric that runs from the fairness of decision procedures, through the emotional bond between hosts and guests, to residents’ readiness to share the work of governing. In destinations around the world now grappling with overtourism, that insight reframes the problem. The question is not only how to divide tourism’s benefits, but how to govern — and simply treat people — in ways that make residents want to be part of the answer.

Subject of Research: Associations between perceived governance justice, emotional solidarity with tourists, and residents' co-governance participation intention in tourism-affected communities

Article Title: Justice under tourism pressure: Governance fairness, emotional solidarity, and residents’ co-governance participation intention in tourism-affected communities

Article References: Jiang, X. (2026). Justice under tourism pressure: Governance fairness, emotional solidarity, and residents’ co-governance participation intention in tourism-affected communities. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360394. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360394

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360394

Keywords: tourism governance, co-governance, organizational justice, distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, emotional solidarity, overtourism, resident participation, Wuxi China, structural equation modeling, destination management