This study explores the application of the co-design approach in participatory planning for the development of Kambo Tourism Village, located at the intersection of urban and rural areas in Indonesia. By combining the Delphi Consensus Method and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the study successfully identified and prioritized key aspects in the planning process, with a primary focus on local community participation. The results indicate that the co-design approach is effective in creating a masterplan that not only aligns with the needs and aspirations of the community but also supports the sustainability and inclusiveness of tourism village development. AHP results reveal that local community participation was assigned the highest priority with a weight of 0.35, followed by stakeholder collaboration with a weight of 0.27. Community participation not only contributed to the creation of a well-structured tourism village masterplan but also enhanced human resource quality and strengthened stakeholder collaboration. The impact of this participatory planning process includes increased national recognition for Kambo Village, the village’s success in receiving awards, and local economic growth. Moreover, the study identified a gap between the calculated and expected weights in the AHP process, highlighting the complexity of aligning diverse stakeholder perspectives. These findings offer both practical and theoretical contributions and open opportunities for further research to address the challenges of participatory planning in the context of tourism villages.

Localization is globally accepted as the strategy towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this article, we put forth the South Indian state of Kerala as a true executor of the localization of SDGs owing to her foundational framework of decentralized governance. We attempt to understand how the course of decentralization acts as a development trajectory and how it has paved the way for the effective assimilation of localization principles post-2015 by reviewing the state documents based on the framework propounded by the United Nations. We theorize that the well-established decentralization mechanism, with delegated institutions and functions thereof, encompasses overlapping mandates with the SDGs. Further, through the tools of development plan formulation, good governance, and community participation at decentralized levels, Kerala could easily adapt to localization, concocting output through innovative measures of convergence, monitoring, and incentivization carried out through the pre-existing platforms and processes. The article proves that constant and concerted efforts undertaken by Kerala through her meticulous and action-oriented decentralized system aided the localization of SDGs and provides an answer to the remarkable feat that the state has achieved through the consecutive four times achievements in the state scores of SDG India Index.