Barriers to Stakeholder Involvement in Sustainable Rural Tourism Development—Experiences from Southeast Europe

Abstract

Participative planning approaches are vital to sustainable development in rural areas. However, stakeholder involvement also faces many barriers. In this Danube region case study, barriers to stakeholder involvement across eight rural regions are investigated. With the standardized conditions provided through an ERDF and IPA funded EU project, special attention could be paid to socio-cultural barriers, specifically concerning perception of sustainability and conflicts of interest. The effects of these barriers to the planning process are seen in the comparison of awareness concerning overall goals, indicators and the regional self-assessments. The implications for planning and management in rural tourism areas find that the perception of sustainability varies greatly, perceived deficiencies increase awareness and that crucial indicators need to be understood by stakeholders beginning a participative planning approach.

“Agro”, “Agri”, or “Rural”: The Different Viewpoints of Tourism Research Combined with Sustainability and Sustainable Development

“…Even though the most important issues of themes/sub-themes-supply, demand, residents, policy, qualitative and quantitative methods-are not presented analytically in this paper, our preliminary findings indicate that they are explored mainly on qualitative grounds, from the supply side (related to the types of farms, the services and products offered [114] (p. 164)) and with limited concern about policy implications/recommendations. These findings are in line with Yang et al (2010) [30], pointing to the need to compare more cases, both geographically (a few examples are the references [63,76,112,[118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125]) and in scale (micro and macro level, locally and globally), from the supply and the demand side, with different stakeholders/actors (including residents, such as reference [126]), which, in turn, might lead to an improved theoretical and practical understanding of these types of development (sustainable and local). With regard to the combination and in-depth analysis of the three dimensions of sustainable development, economy, society, and environment, what emerges is that, thus far, authors have mainly adopted mono perspectives in their studies and multidisciplinary approaches are much less embraced, as also shown by Ammirato et al (2020) [12].…”

What if the local community is already well-off enough? Stakeholders’ conflicts over sustainable tourism development in remote communities

“…Within the tourism context, the stakeholder theory helps in understanding representativeness and power over certain decisions related to the implementation of STDs (Elgammal and Jones, 2008; Gössling and Hall, 2019; Wanner and Pröbstl-Haider, 2019). Accordingly, scholars present six broad categories of stakeholders, i.e.…”

Evaluation of the Sustainable Development of Traditional Ethnic Village Tourist Destinations: A Case Study of Jiaju Tibetan Village in Danba County, China

“…In terms of the social aspect, there is a need to strengthen the construction of basic service facilities, promote the convenience of transportation [6], improve the support of community members [7], and reasonably plan the space production of the community [8]. In terms of employment, it is important to create employment opportunities [9], make good use of surplus rural labor [10], and encourage stakeholders to actively participate in rural tourism activities [11] as well as the sustainable development of the destination [12]. Economically, it is essential to assist industrial integration through extending the industrial chain of rural tourism [13], optimizing the tourism industry structure [14], integrating the development mode of a circular economy into rural tourism, and developing and innovating the benefit distribution mechanism of rural tourism [15].…”