EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Tourism and cross-border regional development: insights in European contexts

Arie Stoffelen and Dominique Vanneste

European Planning Studies, 2017, vol. 25, issue 6, 1013-1033

Abstract: This paper aims to structurally analyse the role of tourism in regional development processes in European cross-border regions with different historical development paths. Departing from an institutional perspective, the research is based on comparison of the position of tourism in region-building processes in the newly developing German–Czech cross-border region and the more ‘mature’ German–Belgian borderlands. Results indicate that the development of local cross-border tourism projects is no guarantee for positive destination-wide regional development impacts. In some cases, these projects may even reinforce asymmetrical socio-economic development directions of neighbouring borderlands. Rather, the socio-spatially equitable distribution of tourism benefits in cross-border contexts depends on several process-based aspects. These include the presence of ‘thick’ (cross-border) institutional arrangements, multi-scalar representation of tourism stakeholders in decision-making processes and a transversal position of tourism in regional development strategies. However, both with cross-border institutional ‘under-mobilization’ (Germany–Czech Republic) and with institutional ‘over-mobilization’ (Germany–Belgium), the informal network position of institutional brokers proved key for safeguarding the integrative character of tourism in the inevitably complex cross-border region-building process.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09654313.2017.1291585 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eurpls:v:25:y:2017:i:6:p:1013-1033

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEPS20

DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2017.1291585

Access Statistics for this article

European Planning Studies is currently edited by Philip Cooke and Louis Albrechts

More articles in European Planning Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst (chris.longhurst@tandf.co.uk).

 
Page updated 2024-12-29
Handle: RePEc:taf:eurpls:v:25:y:2017:i:6:p:1013-1033