The tourism industry represents a great engine of sustainable development for the markets of the 21st century, so that it is a promising industry where a differentiated set of actors and factors interact: the State, the business sector, organized communities and tourists. The objective of the research is to rethink a coherent public policy for the promotion of rural tourism in general, with special emphasis on communication for development and social change. The documentary research methodology and the SWOT analysis technique were used as a condition of possibility to visualize the strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats that the implementation of a policy such as the one proposed would have in a specific context. The authors conclude that, in any imaginable scenario, political communication always enters into the equation for the formulation of tourism sector policies: (rural tourism + sustainable development = social change), as a space of synthesis that articulates in the collective imagination, ideas, concepts, feelings and objectives that create and recreate the conditions for social change, as a higher stage of sustainable development in the 21st century.