Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The civil society refers to the arena of actors that can be variously described as consumers,
workers or labour force in the industry, community members or tax payers and the electorate
who are best able to determine the most appropriate form of tourism development in their
community. The role of the rural tourism industry is not only that of the provider of public
goods, benefi ts and services, but also as a contributor of jobs and taxes. Finally, the public
sector agencies (e.g. the tourist boards, local authorities) are considered in literature as
providers of public service as well as regulators, but also as a locus for collective political
action needed to address and ameliorate negative impacts of the industry (Dredge, 2006).
The broad exchange arenas between these three actor-sets take the shape of
political exchange
between public sector agencies and the civil society defi ned by consultation, participation in
strategic decision-making (Seongseop
et al.
, 2007);
commercial exchange
, characterised by
worker-employer relationships and consumer-supplier relationships; and
regulatory exchange
,
representing monitoring, support and infrastructure development offered by public sector
agencies through public funding and policy-led collective action or partnerships to the
industry (Sasidharan
et al.
, 2002). The prominence of mutual interface between different
actors places pluralistic intermediation at the centre of the structure of exchange.
Nevertheless, it would be over-simplistic to say that the evolving framework of market-
oriented reform parameters in rural regions that have put in place partnership mechanisms
and strategic objectives guided by the welfare of the locals are built upon concerns about
different variants of inequality. There is a need for further research that allows an examina-
tion of the extent to which the frameworks of analysis to date have assisted or impeded geog-
raphers in explaining the actual or potential ways of re-conceiving and reconstructing rural
tourism development from the perspective of place-based practices of stakeholders who are
quite often dissimilar, yet still manage to function together.
Thus the essentially mixed and hybrid character of rural destinations calls for detailed
empirical research into what Shubin (2006) describes as 'everyday ruralities' to counter the
import of assumptions derived from urban case studies. This has been addressed by a greater
emphasis on the need to engage relationally with respondents through an active and mutually
constitutive 'dialogue' with the hope of empowering the respondents during the research
process to give them greater authority over what they think should be included in research
(Cloke
et al.
, 2004; Harvey, 1996; Massey, 1999). Studies that achieve rapprochement between
human and physical geography can further help shed new light on particular sets of factors -
usually categorised as 'economic', 'political', 'social' and 'cultural' - that spin together in
specifi c ways to produce benign or exploitative forms of rural tourism in different places.
Also, as Thrift (2002) points out, an interdisciplinary perspective can help apply knowledges
from multiple disciplines to build new relationships between researchers and the researched
and extend ways of how their work is perceived and communicated. This can also help keep
rural tourism geography buoyant in educational institutions where it has been either diluted
by other disciplines or has to compete with them.
Conclusions
To conclude, it can be said that rural tourism is a useful tool for examining paradoxes and
progress in a range of relations (economic, political, social and cultural) across a wide variety
of socio-spatial contexts. In the present context, geographies of rural tourism allow one to
articulate, give meaning to and make sense of the increasingly complex linkages between
global processes, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a variety of socio-spatial and
particularly cultural behaviours within and between different rural contexts as well as in the
