Tourism and Recreational Industry for Rural Development in Ukrainian Mountains

Abstract

This article addresses how to develop national and local policy on tourism and recreation in mountainous rural areas considering the recreational capacity, demographic patterns and economic situations, with an emphasis on local livelihoods. Management of recreational natural resources is an integral component of the national environmental policy. It is considered that the recreational natural resources management is broader than the recreational industry management, since the former covers protection and restoration of the resources. The multiplier economic effect and joint use of recreational resources by various users are the key issues for the industry. Evidently, almost in all the Ukraine’s regions, accessible recreational resources are not used efficiently enough. In order to evolve an appropriate sustainable tourism policy, a multilevel algorithm is developed on how to classify areas depending on the recreational resources and tourism industry. The algorithm supplies several policy models of the recreational industry’s development, taking into account the types of settlements (urban, rural, intermediate, and mountainous), proximity of settlements to urban centres (urbanized and peripheral), recreational capacity of areas (high, medium, low), and economic efficiency of local recreational industry (productive, semi-productive, unproductive). Accordingly, three types of communities’ development strategies have been suggested. They include the recreational focus, profound recreational industry, and recreations for locals. The novelty of this research is that it presents the approach on how to assess the capacity of local recreational recourses and the industry. The multilevel algorithm is proposed to classify areas and define better approaches for the local policies.