Challenges and opportunities for rural tourism geographies: a view from the ‘boring’ peripheries

The invitation to contribute to Tourism Geographies’ 20th anniversary editorial series prompted me to reflect a bit on my own journey as a rural tourism geographer. I would call myself a ‘late bloomer’ in tourism geography. Unlike many of TG’s editorial board members, I was never specifically trained as a geographer. With an industry background in tourism, I graduated with a Master’s degree in tourism management from an Austrian university of applied sciences in the mid-2000s. Although the degree was branded as an interdisciplinary tourism studies program, the focus on tourism marketing and business management issues, as well as applied and ‘industry-friendly’ research, was overwhelming. While interesting at the time, I can say in hindsight that critical geographical perspectives on tourism – including geographical questions, theories and methodologies – featured only marginally (if at all) as part of the degree. My geographic ‘awakening’, and the realisation that what I was actually interested in was essentially tourism geography, did not occur to me until half way through my PhD. I was working in Australia at the time (in the Northern Territory and the Far North of South Australia), conducting research on the dynamics of ‘tourism innovation systems’ in remote resource peripheries. It was there that I came to realise that many of the tourism development fundamentals taught as part of my Central European tourism degree simply did not apply in this remote context due to the limitations and uniqueness of its geography. Place simply mattered, especially in relation to the region’s physical isolation, extreme climate, sparse population and settlement structures, dispersed industry characteristics, socio-cultural differences, historic economic priorities, institutional arrangements and political agendas, transport and infrastructure provisions, and so on. Digging further into the literature around remote tourism and economic development, I realised that many of the critical studies I was drawing on for my research had been done by geographers, both tourism-specific and broader rural development geographers. Suddenly unsure about my disciplinary home base (I was enrolled in a business school after all), I asked my supervisor – ‘What am I? Am I really a geographer?’ He just laughed, and said – ‘Sure, why not? You can be anything you want!’ And so a new (rural) tourism geographer was born…

I share this little anecdote with you to show that there are many pathways to becoming a tourism geographer. You do not necessarily have to ‘grow up’ within geography as a discipline to conduct geographic research, even if I have to admit that this journey can also be quite challenging at times (for example, I often felt – and sometimes still feel – that I do not have the same theoretical or methodological foundations as some of my geography-trained peers, and that I still have a lot of ‘catch-up’ reading to do). However, as many of these so-called interdisciplinary tourism programs are becoming more industry-oriented, I sometimes worry a bit about the future of geography – and critical geographic questions that look beyond the task of ‘boosting’ tourism as an industry – within those programs. I often get the impression that tourism students seem to expect or demand more ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘industry relevance’ rather than asking deeper question about tourism and its challenges and opportunities in different places. Whether this is endemic to tourism programs I do not know, but judging from my (arguably more limited) experience with non-tourism students, and from talking to non-tourism geographers, I cannot shake off the feeling that tourism students are a different breed in this respect.

As some of my colleagues have already argued in their editorials, geography has certainly contributed many important perspectives, theories and conceptual models to tourism research, emphasising geography’s ‘foundational role in tourism studies’ (Che, 2018, p. 164) over the past decades. This has been particularly evident in the rural or peripheral tourism literature, which has drawn on a variety of geography concepts and approaches over the years, including spatial, historic, evolutionary, economic, institutional, political, cultural, population, transport, or environmental geography perspectives (Brouder, 2012; George, Mair & Reid, 2009; Hall & Boyd, 2005; Hohl & Tisdell, 1995; Krakover & Gradus, 2002; Koster, 2007; Lane & Kastenholz, 2015; Müller & Jansson, 2007; Prideaux, 2002; Saxena, Clark, Oliver, and Ilbery, 2007; Schmallegger, Carson, Tremblay, 2010; Sharpley, 2002; Wanhill, 1997). Geography thus seems to be omnipresent in rural tourism studies. Unfortunately, the same cannot quite be said (yet) about the acknowledged role of tourism research in broader rural geography studies, despite increasing recognition that tourism, with its associated forms of mobility, plays a vital and integral part of rural populations and economies.

Tourism geographers have previously discussed a certain marginalisation of tourism geography within the broader ‘mainstream’ field of geography (Gibson, 2008; Gill, 2012; Hall, 2013; Ioannides, 2006; Müller, 2014), and I share some of their concerns, at least to some degree. While I do not think that tourism geography research has been all that marginal in the broader rural geography literature (e.g. tourism studies seem to feature quite regularly in prominent non-tourism specific journals, such as Rural Studies or the various Geographer journals of particular countries), I sometimes wonder if rural tourism discussions continue to be a bit isolated from broader rural geography discussions. I often receive papers from non-tourism journals for review in which authors refer in some way or another to tourism as part of rural development futures, yet without any acknowledgement of (or engagement with) the tourism literature in this field, which I find a bit disappointing. In a similar vein, tourism seems to be a prominent topic at conferences with a strong rural development focus (e.g. at a recent Arctic social science conference in Umeå, Sweden, we received over 30 tourism-related abstracts and multiple tourism-themed session proposals, making tourism one of the more prominent fields of discussion along with mining and Indigenous issues). However, I often have the impression that those in the audience are primarily other tourism researchers, suggesting that we may to some extent be ‘preaching to the choir’ (Ioannides, 2006, p. 82), without making inroads into knowledge spillover into broader rural geography debates.

I have no doubt that, in order to better understand rural places, we need more integrated perspectives that do not deal with tourism in isolation from other industries or the broader historic, environmental, political, institutional, demographic or cultural forces that shape socio-economic systems in these places. To me, it is the confluence of such different perspectives and lenses that will help us better understand the specific development pathways of rural places, and tourism perspectives should thus feature as a more integrated part of, and not separately to, other perspectives. While this is by no means a new or revolutionary suggestion, I often still miss such broader integrated views in rural (tourism) studies. This is particularly problematic for studies focusing on ‘non-tourism’ places, which in my opinion continue to be under-researched to date. These are the ‘boring’ or ‘in-between’ places (for lack of better terms) that are not exotic or attractive enough to establish tourism as a self-contained major industry (Ramsey & Malcolm, 2017), and where the legacies of other economic and political priorities or broader population changes inevitably determine the nature and scale of tourism that is possible in those contexts (Carson & Carson, 2014). A tourism-centric (or even exclusive) rural development perspective thus runs the risk of neglecting other important factors and processes that shape rural development trajectories in those peripheries, just like a perspective focusing primarily on e.g. mining or forestry risks to ignore the potential interrelationships with tourism and tourism-related mobilities.

Related to the above, I would also like to see a greater effort in the literature to differentiate more explicitly between different rural or peripheral tourism contexts, as the types of rural destinations featured in the literature often differ tremendously in terms of their remoteness, institutional structures, economic histories, industry characteristics, amenity values, population dynamics, and so on… or as we used to say in Australia: if you’ve seen one country town, you’ve only seen one country town! Understanding such diversity requires a deeper engagement with the specificities of place that acknowledges and considers the diverse historic, economic, human, institutional, cultural, etc forces that shape local development paths. This would open up the floor again for more in-depth case studies aimed at understanding rural places and why their specific experiences may differ from one another. Case study research appears to have become somewhat disregarded or discredited in recent years (for being too descriptive, not generalizable, not advancing theory), and many leading journals (in tourism and other geography fields) seem to have turned towards more theory- or methodology-oriented papers instead (often with a focus on quantitative methods, big data, and regional/spatial modelling approaches). I think there is a need to re-discover the role of case studies in geography research, and also re-appreciate the value of ‘methodological pluralism’, making use of alternative approaches including immersive and ethnographic methods, thick description, community-based and participative ‘dirt research’, narratives and historical accounts, media analysis and so forth (Gill, 2012; Peters et al., 2018). It is therefore great to see that Tourism Geographies has introduced an annual special issue dedicated to understanding specific tourism places (Lew, 2017), and thus provides a renewed platform for ‘thick’ place-based case study research.

There is also a need for more longitudinal case study approaches that monitor and engage with particular destinations or communities over longer periods of time. Much of the case study research in rural (tourism) geography seems to have focused on relatively static, one-off research snapshots, examining a particular research question at a particular point in time… just like I did in my PhD case study work ten years ago. Now, as I am re-visiting many of the places and people I included in my research, I realise how dynamic and fast-changing rural tourism places can be. What I considered as the next big tourism success story back then, has long gone out of business. Promising tourism clusters and networks have ceased to exist. Innovative entrepreneurs and lifestyle migrants have left the region, while new ones have emerged. Pro-active local governments have turned their backs on tourism because it did not fulfil its early promises, or could not compete with the sheep or wheat lobby over time, and so on. Would I do the same research again I did back then, I would probably reach very different conclusions and recommendations. I therefore commend researchers who engage with ‘their’ case study destinations regularly over longer periods of time, and in (self-)critical ways, as there seem to be relatively few such examples in the literature (Alison Gill’s work on tourism development in Whistler (Gill, 2018), or Greg Halseth’s work on post-mining diversification in Tumbler Ridge (Halseth, Markey, Ryser, Hanlon, & Skinner, 2018) come to mind, coincidentally both in Canada). Longitudinal case study research may be able to better capture the inherent fragility and volatility of tourism and other development in peripheral rural contexts, and also contribute to the gradual build-up of local, place-based knowledge that will help future generations of rural geographers understand tourism dynamics in these boring peripheries. It is my hope that Tourism Geographies will continue to lead the way in accommodating such alternative place perspectives.

Doris Anna Carson
Department of Geography and Economic History, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
[email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.