Abstract
Abstract
Community-based tourism villages across the developing world increasingly gain formal recognition through national certification and award schemes, yet many fail to convert that recognition into sustained digital visibility. This paper examines this recognition–visibility gap through a qualitative case study of Ampiang Parak, a coastal mangrove and sea turtle conservation tourism village in West Sumatra, Indonesia, which received the 2024 Anugerah Desa Wisata Indonesia national award. In-depth interviews with eight stakeholders, content analysis of the village’s digital platforms, and field observation reveal three interlocking gaps: a strategic gap between certification and operational digital planning, a representational gap in which residents appear as photographic subjects rather than narrators of their own story, and an evaluative gap in which digital engagement goes unmeasured. Drawing on Scheyvens’ empowerment framework, the paper argues that digital-era community-based tourism requires a fifth, communicative dimension of empowerment—the capacity of a community to narrate its own tourism product to external audiences—that functions as a precondition for the economic, psychological, social and political dimensions the framework already describes. The study proposes a five-component community-narrated communication model and discusses its implications for certification policy design and destination management in resource-constrained rural settings.