Rural destination development contributions by outdoor tourism actors: A Bornholm case study

Abstract

Outdoor tourism is on the growth agenda of public strategies and public-private development partnerships in many peripheral areas of the world, raising high expectations for job creation and rural development. Based on participant observation in an outdoor tourism cluster project and qualitative interviews with other tourism and regional development actors on the Baltic island of Bornholm, Denmark, this research asks how the micro-entrepreneurs and volunteer event organizers contribute to rural destination development, and how their contributions can best be supported by regional development actors. Drawing on the concepts of placial engagement and translocal connections, the research shows that micro-entrepreneurs’ and volunteer event organizers’ mobility and multi-local place engagement, combined with their orientation towards goals other than profit maximation, represent a strong rural place-development potential – a potential that tends to be undervalued by established tourism and regional development actors. The small-scale outdoor tourism actors show strong collaborative and networking behaviour regarding business, product, and place development. In addition to (modest) tourism-generated income and (often part-time) employment, they contribute by providing new residents, business diversity and flexibility, translocal resources and knowledge, as well as actively engage in place-making and branding. These diverse qualities can be argued to strengthen innovation, attractiveness and community resilience in economically challenged rural areas. The relevance of using a translocal perspective on tourism entrepreneurship and rural destination development is exemplified by the article in its presentation of the wider development contributions of the micro outdoor tourism actors which are important to acknowledge for regional development actors to build on them strategically.

摘要

在世界许多偏远地区, 户外旅游已被列入公共战略和公私发展伙伴关系的增长议程, 这对创造就业和乡村发展提出了很高的期望。本文基于在丹麦波罗的海博恩霍尔姆岛对一个户外旅游集群项目的参与观察和对该区域旅游与区域发展行动者们的定性访谈, 探究了小企业家们和志愿者活动组织者如何对乡村目的地发展做出贡献,以及区域发展行动者如何最好地支持这些贡献。本研究借鉴地方参与和跨地方连接的概念, 研究表明小企业家和志愿活动组织者的流动性和多个地点的地方参与, 结合面向迥异于利润最大化的目标,代表了一个强大的乡村地方发展的潜力, 这个潜力往往为现有旅游与区域发展行动者所低估。这些小规模的户外旅游行动者在商业、产品和地方开发方面表现出很强的协作和联络行为。除了(适度的)旅游收入和(通常是兼职的)工作, 他们还通过提供新居民、商业多样性和灵活性、跨本地资源和知识, 以及积极参与地方营造和品牌建设而做出贡献。这些多样性的特质可以被认为是在经济低迷的乡村地区强化创新、吸引力和社区恢复力。本文通过展示小型户外旅游行动者对乡村目的地广泛的发展贡献时, 以实例说明了在旅游创业和乡村目的地发展中使用跨地区视角的适切性, 这对于承认区域发展行动者在战略上构建这些特质是很重要的。

Keywords:

• Outdoor tourism
• micro-entrepreneurs
• placial embeddedness
• rural development
• destination development
• translocalism
• resilience
• collaboration
• Bornholm
• Denmark

关键词::

• 户外旅游;小企业家;地方嵌入性；乡村发展
• 目的地发展;跨地方主义； 弹性
• 协作
• 博恩霍尔姆 (Bornholm)
• 丹麦

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the many interviewees who shared their valuable experiences and viewpoints, and the coordinator and the participants in the ‘Outdoor Cluster Project’, who welcomed the research team into their activities and allowed us to observe and take part. She would also like to thank colleagues, especially Sune Rasmussen, Emil Holland and Lene Feldthus Andersen, for project collaboration. Finally, she would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. The work was supported by the Innovation Fund Denmark under Grant 5154-00002B, as part of the project titled ‘Innovation in Coastal Tourism: Co-creating Competitive Experiences (InnoCoast)’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Rural tourism here understood broadly as tourism in areas considered as rural (Müller, 2013).

2 Lifestyle entrepreneurs can be defined as entrepreneurs who set up firms primarily to ‘undertake an activity the owner-manager enjoys, or to achieve a level of activity that provides adequate income’ (Peters et al., 2009, p. 397).

3 Looking at all sectors, Bornholm has fewer start-ups than the national average, and most remain small. Of 876 newly established private-sector jobs 2009-2015, 69% remain as single-person firms. However, national statistics only provide information on companies with half-time employment or more, and thus excludes some of the existing firms due to their small size (Hedetoft et al., 2018).

4 The term ‘entrepreneurs’ is used herein for persons who have established a company within the past ten years, following Hedetoft et al. (2018). The prefix ‘micro’ is used to signify entrepreneurs who have either no employees (and often supplement with other economic activities), or who have employees, but only part time and seasonal.

5 Local Action Groups are formal organizations with civic, business and local government representatives, managing a modest budget from the EU for supporting rural development initiatives.

6 Micro outdoor tourism entrepreneurs, established tourism accommodation actors, nature-oriented civil society organizations and education actors, as well as civil servants working with areal management and planning.

7 A similar matrix query by size of organizations showed no clear difference, suggesting that attitude towards cooperation, coordination and competition depends more on the type of actor than on the size of the organisation (Table not presented).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rikke Brandt Broegaard

Rikke Brandt Broegaard is a human geographer with a PhD in international development studies who has been working with community development, rural areas and inequality all of her professional life, both in Denmark and in the Global South. In a Danish context, her research focuses on rural development and peripheralisation processes, including innovation, place-making and inclusiveness, with special attention to the role that micro-entrepreneurs and translocal actors play therein. She shares her work time between the Centre for Regional and Tourism Research, on the Danish Baltic island of Bornholm, and the Department of Geoscience and Natural Resource Management, Copenhagen University.