Community involvement in tourism: exploring the place image guided by the locals

  • Monica Pascoli University of Udine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18543/ced-64-2021pp111-136
Keywords: tourism, sustainability, participation, community-based tourism, imaginary

Abstract

This paper is intended as a contribution to the debate on tourism sustainability and the need to involve local communities in planning practices, key to sustainable tourism. The community-based approach has been widely theorized and used in projects of sustainable tourism development, because it tends to maximize the participation of local population from the earliest stages of development and affect tourism policies, while also responding to the changing needs of contemporary tourists, especially in terms of development of niche and special-interest tourism. The only exception is in the construction of the tourist imaginary: the involvement of the community in this fundamental sphere has always been scarce, with the result that often there is a strong imbalance – even dissonance – between the image promoted through the marketing, that continuously re-shaped by the locals and that experienced by the tourists. This contribution will explore the creation of tourism imaginary as negotiated activity.

Received: 03 February 2021
Accepted: 01 March 2021

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Author Biography

Monica Pascoli, University of Udine

Monica Pascoli, PhD, is Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Udine and lecturer of Sociology and Methodology of Social Research at the Universities of Udine and Trieste, Italy. She is part of the Euroculture Master Programme teaching staff (Erasmus Mundus Programme of Excellence).She is currently working on an EU funded project on community-based tourism development, focusing on the community involvement in the creation of the tourism image of a destination. Her research interests comprise tourism and the memory of the First World War, socio cultural impacts of tourism development, risk behavior in adolescence. Her recent works are Il turismo della memoria in Friuli Venezia Giulia (with A. Pocecco, FrancoAngeli, forthcoming), Italy (in Tourism Governance. A Critical Discourse on a Global Industry, De Gruyter, forthcoming), Le indagini sulle generazioni fragili (in Nuovi sentieri sociologici, FrancoAngeli, 2018), Young Italians in Search of Opportunities: The Image of Europe as a Lifeline (in Visions and Revisions of Europe, Göttingen University Press, 2018).

Published
2021-05-14
How to Cite
Pascoli, Monica. 2021. “Community Involvement in Tourism: Exploring the Place Image Guided by the Locals”. Deusto Journal of European Studies, no. 64 (May), 111-36. https://doi.org/10.18543/ced-64-2021pp111-136.
Issue
No. 64 (2021): A sustainable Europe: Society, Politics and Culture in the Anthropocene
Section
Articles

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