Tourism is recognized as a potential development mechanism for peripheral rural communities encountering various changes and challenges. However, a relatively unexplored theme in previous studies is that tourism’s potential benefits to rural communities are affected by rural development policies and practices: specifically, a collaborative governance approach. Based on a case study from Vuonislahti, a peripheral locale in the municipality of Lieksa, Finland, this article frames a community tourism collaborative governance approach. The study suggests that the village community receives limited tourism benefits because of various constraints rooted in the specific socioeconomic and institutional settings of the village and beyond. However, the struggle to formulate a fair and effective community tourism collaborative governance approach may bring positive socioeconomic benefits to the village and to other similarly declining rural communities in Finland and beyond. The approach is conceptually tentative in nature and its theoretical development needs to be complemented with additional research findings from empirical case studies conducted in diverse rural socioeconomic and institutional contexts of countries under different regimes.
Rural tourism has long been considered the means of accelerating economic and social development, and has become a development tool for many rural areas. In response to agricultural structure adjustment, rural tourism in China took into shape as a new economic growth point to meet the market demand at the late 1980s. Now, a structural frame of rural tourism has shaped, with the core of Zhujiang (Pearl) River Delta, Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu of China. But in Xinjiang, the western part of China, there are hardly any studies in this field in spite of its richness of tourism resources. In this paper, development of rural tourism is studied in Turpan of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. With its rich natural and cultural tourism resources, Turpan has become one of the pioneer tourism destinations in China. But same to the rural tourism development of the other areas' of China, rural tourism programs in Turpan mainly aimed at sightseeing activities, and little attention had been paid to the protection and exploitation of national minority culture--an important factor to satisfy both tourists demand and local economic development. However, this kind of rural tourism development policy is harmful on the long run. Because, many tourists seek tourist destinations that offer pleasant experiences related to not only the natural environment but also historic heritage and cultural patterns. The study suggests that on the base of government support in the long term, to enhance tourism training, to protect and exploit national minority culture are essential elements of rural tourism development in Turpan.
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