Reflexões sobre capital social e turismo comunitário no Rio Grande do Norte, Nordeste do Brasil

The aim of this article is to understand the social capital’s influence on the community tourism development, based on the municipality of Maxaranguape’s experience, in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. The methodology used in this article is focused in a qualitative approach, profess by Bauer (2002), using semi-structured and non-directive interviews to collect data from the actors involved in the action. To analyze the collected data, we used the content analysis, as proposed by Bardin (2009). The results (i) show the actions didn’t have continuity for the community tourism development, (ii) as well as the lack of engagement of both individuals and organizations sufficient to leverage the implementation of community tourism. As a conclusion, the Novo Horizonte settlement has a low social capital structure, which definitely contributed to the non-continuity of community tourism actions.