Community participation in sustainable rural tourism experience creation: a long-term appraisal and lessons from a thematic villages project in Poland

Abstract

The paper has twin but related objectives. It examines the origins of the concept of theme villages in creating new rural tourism experiences and explores issues in the implementation of the concept. It also discusses the role of community involvement in theme village development, probing and testing existing models of local participation in tourism development in the context of five thematic villages in Poland. The fiveyear research project based on participatory action research covered the entire process of forming thematic rural tourist products. Five years later its effectiveness and sustainability was measured by a follow-up study. As a result, a seven-step community-created sustainable rural tourism development model is proposed. Local involvement in creating thematic villages is much more intensive and has such a wide scope that one cannot speak of facilitating or involving a community in the development process, but rather of tourism development creation by local communities. However, the social focus and inward-oriented perspective of community tourism can hamper effective adaptation of local resources to suit market needs and thus prevent the sustainable growth of community linked rural tourism. Expert external assistance may be necessary at key stages, especially by providing professional knowledge of markets and marketing.

Rural Tourism in Georgia in Transition: Challenges for Regional Sustainability

“…In the majority of definitions, Rural Tourism is seen as a rather broad umbrella concept, considering many different types of tourism [31,32] based on rural accommodation or farm stays, but also in villages and small towns, where agriculture need not be a significant player [29,33]. Community approaches, particularly community involvement in planning and management processes, link Rural Tourism to the concept of "Community-Based Tourism" [34][35][36][37][38][39]. This term is more often used in developing countries that lack infrastructure and strong local entrepreneurship.…”

“…The concept of Rural Tourism also promotes community involvement in development processes, particularly in planning, decision-making, and the implementation of projects [35,50], which then can contribute to long-term sustainable rural development and support the achievement of economic and social goals at different levels [35,51].…”

“…Such social interaction can create solid social capital. The collective commitment of stakeholders in networks and public-private partnerships supports both individual businesses and regional strategic development, which can be beneficial for the whole community [35,38,39,47].…”

Changes in Traditional Activities of Industrial Area toward Sustainable Tourism Development

“…Different forms of local support, often related to social capital, as a product of various social relations between numerous social groups, could significantly facilitate the initiation of entrepreneurial activity. Therefore, the research related to entrepreneurship could also be viewed within the framework of the social network theory, primarily on the basis of the complexity of entrepreneurial venture and its connection with numerous actors in the local community [41,[60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72].…”

Thinking against "Empty Shells" in Tourism Development Projects

“…In the paper "Community participation in sustainable rural tourism experience creation: a long-term appraisal and lessons from a thematic villages project in Poland" (Idziak, Majewski and Zmyślony 2015) the authors present their study of five thematic villages in North Poland. These projects form an interesting set of case studies in rural tourism development, described by the researchers as community-created -or in our terminology, valuing the project.…”