Tourism Collaborative Governance and Rural Community Development in Finland: The Case of Vuonislahti

Abstract

Tourism is recognized as a potential development mechanism for peripheral rural communities encountering various changes and challenges. However, a relatively unexplored theme in previous studies is that tourism’s potential benefits to rural communities are affected by rural development policies and practices: specifically, a collaborative governance approach. Based on a case study from Vuonislahti, a peripheral locale in the municipality of Lieksa, Finland, this article frames a community tourism collaborative governance approach. The study suggests that the village community receives limited tourism benefits because of various constraints rooted in the specific socioeconomic and institutional settings of the village and beyond. However, the struggle to formulate a fair and effective community tourism collaborative governance approach may bring positive socioeconomic benefits to the village and to other similarly declining rural communities in Finland and beyond. The approach is conceptually tentative in nature and its theoretical development needs to be complemented with additional research findings from empirical case studies conducted in diverse rural socioeconomic and institutional contexts of countries under different regimes.