Kuvaus
Tourism has become a political go-to strategy for socioeconomic development in Northern sparsely populated areas. It is valued by transnational, national, and regional governmental bodies as a means to generate export-oriented growth, and revitalise infrastructure, cultural life, and natural heritage in remote places. A key tool for stimulating tourism development pathways in these areas is public funding. However, this often follows top-down valuations and development aspirations of higher-level governance stakeholders rather than local communities (Bohn et al., 2023).This paper examines how rural communities in northernmost Finland and Sweden value Arctic tourism locally based on the analysis of LEADER projects executed between 2014 and 2022. The European Union introduced LEADER in the early 1990s as a programme empowering bottom-up development initiatives in rural regions led by local public and private actors and partnerships. LEADER constitutes a specific form of governance that transcends traditional regional or municipal jurisdictions by addressing policy problems within task-specific tailored spaces through voluntary participation (Servillo, 2019).
Across the EU, a substantial number of public and private tourism-focused projects have been funded by LEADER since its inception (Tirado Ballesteros & Hernández Hernández, 2018). For rural sparsely populated areas, LEADER offers opportunities to integrate tourism development in supra-municipal public-private networks (Tirado Ballesteros & Hernández Hernández, 2019).
Yet, little is known about the place-specific geographies and qualitative aspects of valuing tourism as a development pathway in Finnish Lapland and Västerbotten and Norrbotten in northern Sweden.
We analyse funding provided to firms and public organisations under the LEADER framework, to identify where, to what extent, and to what ends locally-led initiatives have executed tourism projects in general and Arctic tourism initiatives in particular. The aim is to gauge how (Arctic) tourism is valued as a bottom-up pathway to community development in remote hinterlands, and what economic, sociocultural or other community values are reflected in the projects. The comparison between Sweden and Finland sheds light on the broader institutional and historically evolved structural settings for LEADER-based tourism development, and reveals differences in the types of Arctic tourism projects supported.
| Aikajakso | 17 syysk. 2025 → 19 syysk. 2025 |
|---|---|
| Tapahtuman otsikko | 33rd Nordic Symposium on Tourism and Hospitality Research |
| Tapahtuman tyyppi | Konferenssi |
| Sijainti | Bornholm , TanskaNäytä kartalla |