Introduction to Rural Tourism Development

Introduction

Rural tourism represents a merging of perhaps two of the most influential yet contradictory features of modern life. Not only are the forces of economic, social, cultural, environmental and political change working to redefine rural spaces the world over, but broad global transformations in consumption and transportation patterns are reshaping leisure behavior and travel. For those concerned with both the nature of change in rural areas and tourism development, the dynamics and impacts of integrating these two dramatic shifts are not well known but are becoming increasingly provocative discourses for study.

While many students of tourism have assessed its qualities and developments, both positive and negative, at the local and global level (see for instance, Smith, 1989; Inskeep, 1991; Haywood, 1993; Hunter & Green, 1995; Hunter, 1997; Murphy, 1998; Mowford & Munt, 1998; Hall & Jenkins, 1998; Fuller & Reid, 1998; Var & Ap, 1998; Robinson, 1999; Yu & Chung, 2001; Barthel-Bouchier, 2001; McIntosh et al., 2002; Urry, 1990, 1995) and many students of rural change have done the same (see for instance, Mormont, 1987; Halfacree, 1993; Bryden, 1994; Shucksmith, 1991; Ray, 2001) the purpose of this book is to bring these two discourses together. We aim to link changes at the local, rural community level to broader, more structural considerations of globalization in order to allow for a deeper, more theoretically sophisticated consideration of the various forces and features of rural tourism development.

While several authors (Murphy, 1985; Gunn, 1985; Blank, 1989; Pearce et al., 1996; Reid et al., 2001) highlight the importance of community involvement in planning tourism and rural community development, our collective experience as instructors, practitioners, students and authors of tourism and rural community development, tells us that there has been both a lack of grounded research in this area as well as any larger overarching theoretical interpretations. Those concerned with community development, rural restructuring and economic growth, in addition to the implications of tourism, are in need of new and relevant resource materials to address the demands of currently changing times. With this book, we aspire to contribute to these investigations in a different way. While most works generally highlight tourism as the subject of development, often positioning the community as merely its vehicle, we reverse this stance and make the local community the subject, thereby situating tourism as just one in a collection of potential options for rural development and sustainability.

The Role of Social Theory: The Benefits of a Political Economy Approach

Perhaps one of the primary contributions of the book is our deliberate effort to cast each of the case studies within an overarching social theory framework. While authors such as Britton (1991) light the way for critical theoretical investigations of tourism developments by linking them to larger social, political and economic structural changes, a book of case studies can help lend some grounded understandings to what is often high level and seemingly unrelated theory. In the same way, many collections of case studies of tourism development, in both rural and urban areas, while providing unique insights about the particularities of tourism development, do not advance enough in what must be on-going efforts to build theoretical and conceptual tools to make sense of these developments at a broader level.

Political economy perspectives seek to highlight the inter-relationships between politics and economics. Simply put, in this view, the actions of the economy are not a predestined outcome of the workings of the market's 'invisible hand', but are the product of politics and power relationships and social struggle. Thus, a project that investigates tourism development from a political economy perspective throws into light (and question) the political underpinnings of its predominantly economic rationalizations. The economic imperative of tourism development, then, becomes problematized. Clement and Vosko (2003: xv) make the case for the Canadian political economy more generally:

We wish to critique economic essentialism in two ways: by arguing that the "economic" itself is a social, political, cultural and ideological construct ... and by arguing that there is no "essentialism", or sameness in the economy, because time and space are ever-present variables for political economy.

Thus, the particular ways in which tourism is developed in rural areas cannot be simplified, as areas change over time and across space. A political economy approach creates room for such a nuanced understanding because it challenges underlying assumptions. Moreover, it also allows room to consider other theoretical explanations for why tourism developments are being created in rural areas. As rural communities struggle with the growing gap between resources and responsibilities (i.e. economic and political restructuring), tourism becomes increasingly popular and appealing as a mechanism for stimulating rural growth in troubled times. As the case studies in this text make clear, although the broader, more structural power relationships shaping the attractiveness of tourism in rural areas are similar, the ways in which these changes manifest themselves are unique to each place.

While the case studies collected here are all Canadian, much can be taken from the lessons learned in this book and extended internationally. There are few places where the effects of the neoliberal forces of economic and political restructuring are not being felt and the diversity of cases presented here can be used to capture and appreciate some of this diversity. That is not to say that every case in the world is like a Canadian case, but those selected here are diverse enough to offer useful fodder for building a conceptual framework to help explain and understand these developments in other places. The Canadian political economy, with its relatively poor and rich areas, its conundrum of rural development and its trajectory of political economic restructuring since the 1970s, contains a number of distinct cases, each teeming with opportunity for learning about the particularities and generalities of tourism development in rural areas anywhere.

Thus, cases...