COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIOPRODUCTIVE ARRANGEMENTS: INTERCONNECTING COMMUNITY TOURISM WITH FAIR TRADE NETWORKS

Abstract

There is no pre-defined approach to interorganizational socioproductive management that encourages traditional communities to promote their own means of production, related to the principles of territorial sustainability. In this context, the term communitarian-based socioproductive arrangement emerges (APL.Com), which contributes to the complexity of the issues surrounding local socioproductive organizational networks quantified as associative, community or individual socio-entrepreneurialism, suggesting socioenvironmental responsibility, articulated in the form of institutional arrangements, and which are recognized as territory and give value to traditional community knowledge, characterized by the capacity to generate demands and proposals that are neither distanced nor unrelated to the day-to-day characteristics, based on the view of the people themselves. The objective of this article was to refine, or rather, to justify the concept of Community-Based Socioproductive Arrangement initially proposed by Sampaio, Mantovaneli Jr. and Pellin (2004) and Sampaio, Mundim and Dias (2004), based on an ongoing experiment which promotes community tourism and which proposes articulation with fair trade networks. It is concluded that the APL.Com, in turn, empowers so-called community tourism, which is a strategy that enables traditional populations, regardless of the degree to which their traditional way of life has been lost amidst the hegemony of industrial urban societies, to become protagonists of their own traditional habits and cultures. Key-words: Community Tourism. Community-Based Socioproductive Arrangement. Fair Trade.