Amenity migration to mountain regions: Current knowledge and a strategic construct for sustainable management

Abstract

Amenity migration has become an important force for change in non-metropolitan high amenity places around the world. Here the focus is on these places in mountain regions that attract permanent and part-time residents because of their comparatively rich concentrations of the earth's remaining natural environment and differentiated culture. Drawing on their own and others’ research and related community development experience, amenity migration, and its dependent economic migration, is identified and their socio-cultural, economic and biophysical effects are described. Although this migration has brought benefits to mountain regions, with exceptions, its characteristic result to date has been a degrading of mountain ecologies along with a complex mixture of positive and negative socio-cultural and economic outcomes. The public, private and volunteer sectors responses to this phenomenon are outlined, and the authors go on to suggest that the benefits of amenity migration could be greater, if this phenomenon was much better understood and managed for ecological sustainability. At the same time, its present negative effects could be reduced or reversed. Strategic analysis, a methodology that was instrumental in formulating the amenity migration construct described here, is explained and this framework and analytical method are proposed for managing amenity migration in mountain regions. The paper also discusses amenity migration in economically developing countries and its relationship to indigenous peoples. However, the very little information available to date on these two subjects has handicapped this objective. In closing the authors suggest research priorities for amenity migration in mountain regions.