Social capital, collective action, and the development of agritourism for sustainable agriculture in rural Indonesia

This study investigates social capital, collective action, agritourism, and sustainable agriculture in rural areas of Indonesia. Social capital, consisting of trust, networks, and norms, would encourage collective action to increase the development of village tourism/agritourism. Therefore, this study proposed more than one latent variable to define this social phenomenon and used a structural equation model (SEM) to predict those variables from the observed variables. The observed variables were two demographic data attributes namely income and education, while the latent were trust, networks, and norms, and were obtained from the question in the questionnaire survey. The results of the Mplus-SEM (Structural Equation Model), indicated that social capital facilitated collective action in societies and had a positive impact on land use protection. Furthermore, education and income as calculated variables directly influence the activities of collective action. The results also showed that higher levels of education influenced the respondents to work together to grow agritourism, in order to increase community income. Such a condition also influences young people to remain in the village, preserve land use as an agricultural system, and encourage sustainable agriculture.