Sustainable tourism development in Liminal Spaces

Abstract

A reported 5.9 million foreign citizens visited Albania in 2018 alone (INSTAT, 2019), marking an increase of 15.8% compared to the previous year. These figures show that the importance of tourism in Albania is growing, as have the number of communities adopting tourism development initiatives as a strategy for local economic development, including “liminal places”. This paper focuses on exploring the concept of liminality, and how the latter can be reversed through tourism development initiatives. A number of specific cases ranging from local to national are researched and used to illustrate the relationship established between this state of in-between-ness and the entrepreneurial ecosystem within a tourism development context. The case studies at the focus of this research paper are two distinctively liminal places, namely: the village of Fishtë in the north-western municipality of Lezhë, and the south-eastern municipality of Gramsh. The aim of this paper is to explore how tourism development can serve to reverse liminality (social, economic), centred around two key questions: What is liminality in a tourism development context? Can liminality be reversed?