Community-based entrepreneurial tourism and eco-mediated place-making: governance of digital-nomad hubs

Digital nomadism links global digital work with local destination development, yet how digital-nomad hubs are governed as tourism systems remains unclear. This study examines thirteen hubs in China through community-based entrepreneurial tourism and eco-mediated place-making. Study 1 uses interviews, field observations, and digital ethnography to show that community embeddedness is entrepreneurially mediated, contingent, and bounded, emerging through member-led participation and reciprocal local relations. Study 2 applies fsQCA to identify configurations of four hub-level conditions producing high embeddedness, revealing two equifinal pathways to high embeddedness and two combinations yielding low embeddedness. The study advances community-based tourism and destination-governance research.