Rural tourism development perceived by involved local farmers: evidences from Gaochun County of China

ABSTRACT

This study aims at investigating the rural tourism development perceived by involved local farmers in China with a case study of Gaochun County. A total of 25 local famers were interviewed and 3 interviews were conducted on the employees from a major external tourism developing company. The text data transcribed from interviews were categorized and analyzed within the framework of the adaptive cycle. The findings indicate that becoming a Gaochun town is an external disturbance to the activation of system release and reorganization, and the subsequent support and tourism policies from the local government can be regarded as an improvement force that accelerates the system into the phase of exploitation and then into a new cycle. Secondly, rapid rural tourism development didn’t last for a long time before confronting bottlenecks at the crossing of development. Local farmers prefer to stay in the conservation phase in the form of tourism cooperatives, while the government prefers to push the system into the phase of release and reorganization again by attracting external companies to invest on and manage the tourism development without involving local farmers. Both the advantages and disadvantages of those different approaches, as well as management implications, were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural tourism development
• famer involvement
• social-ecological system
• adaptive cycle

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this article was supported by the Research Project of Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, People’s Republic of China (Project No. 19YB72).

Notes on contributors

Suyan Shen

Suyan Shen, graduated from Geography Department of Cologne University, is a professor in the Department of Tourism Management in College of Economics and Management at Nanjing Forestry, China. The research interest includes rural tourism, ecotourism and heritage tourism.

Qianhong Quan

Qianhong Quan is a postgraduate student in Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences of Nanjing Forestry University.