Sustainable development of rural areas: a dynamic model in between tourism exploitation and landscape decline

Abstract

This work investigates how to prevent sustainable tourism from turning into over-tourism dynamics. As a matter of fact, the former has shown to be capable of bringing profit to traditional rural activities (i.e. agriculture), the tourism sector, the environment and the cultural heritage of a region; whereas the latter, more often than not, harms and brings detriment to the natural landscape. Hereof, landscape heritage is a fundamental resource at the base of both rural tourism (RT) and traditional rural activities, and it is reasonable that to adequately support RT a certain degree of built-up growth (i.e. new accommodation facilities and cognate areas) is somewhat needed. However, we want to problematize that these dynamics shall be carefully calibrated and appropriately regulated in a non-conflictual way. We modeled that: (i) land can be either devoted to RT-hosting facilities or agriculture; (ii) RT impacts landscape resources more harmfully, thus diminishing profitability of both sectors. We also posit a policy instrument to preserve landscape resources, financed through RT revenues. The analysis shows that if no policy is applied, over-RT is ineluctable. Conversely, with such a policy instrument it is possible to determine an economic space where all rural economic activities peacefully coexist, and landscape impacts are minimized.