The Camøno: A Communitarian Walking Trail in the Sharing Economy

ABSTRACT

To overcome socioeconomic decline, Danish coastal communities attempt to harness the potentials of the collaborative economy with novel forms of communitarian initiatives in tourism. This paper assesses the emergent business model of the Camøno walking trail, which was conceived as an alternative, bottom-up initiative to leverage tourism in Southern Denmark. To understand its rapid uptake and success, we draw on theorizations of value creation in alternative and sharing economies as a reframing process, with due attention to the transformation of non-market resources into commodities (public land, volunteer labour, sense of place). Based on a two-year-long ethnographic fieldwork chronicling the consolidation of the Camøno, we analyze these reframing processes and identify three domains of collaborative governance; the governance of affect, the governance of ownership and the governance of exchange. The paper concludes with a discussion of the institutionalization of ad-hoc, alternative business models with due attention to policy recommendations in a European rural context.

KEYWORDS:

• Pilgrimage
• tourism cooperatives
• coastal tourism
• collaborative economy
• Camøno
• walking trail
• communitarian business model

Acknowledgements

This research project was supported by the Danish Innovation Fund, under the Innocoast Grant [number 5154-00002B]. We would further wish to express our gratitude to Anette Marie Syska, the initiator and project leader of the Camønoen: Denmark’s friendliest walking route.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Szilvia Gyimóthy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1556-5632

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Innovationsfonden, under the Innocoast grant number 5154-00002B.