Tourism Development in Resource Peripheries : conflicting and Unifying Spaces in Northern Sweden

• Main Author: Byström, Joakim
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Institutionen för geografi 2019
• Subjects: Tourism development; labor market transformation; related diversification; path dependence; resource periphery; pleasure periphery; Human Geography; Kulturgeografi; Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-163522

The northern Swedish inland is a sparsely populated area with a historical dependence upon natural-resource extraction. Therefore, this region has traditionally been defined as a resource periphery for extractive purposes. However, the rise of tourism challenges this narrative by producing a pleasure periphery for touristic purposes. A pleasure periphery in this context is linked to nature-based tourism that sells dreams of pristine nature and/or vast wilderness. This touristic “story” therefore becomes an antithesis to the region's industrial past. The overlapping touristic and extractive spaces, and their seemingly conflicting development narratives, constitute the theoretical approach to tourism development in the scope of this thesis. Further, this thesis adds to theorizing tourism development in northern peripheries, by contesting established development theories against each other in a northern Swedish setting. Multiple methods using both quantitative and qualitative data are used to answer the questions in this thesis. Three conclusions can be derived based on the empirical findings. Firstly, established tourism development theories are at risk of being invalid in more peripheral settings. As an example, protected areas constitute a poor development strategy, and are not producing tourism employment as shown in studies from more densely populated regions. Other destination-development theories presupposing urban-like infrastructure, which is absent in peripheries, also become invalid. Secondly, conflicts between tourism and extractive industries do occur at the discursive level where they tend to be described in dualistic terms. However, in terms of labor-market processes, findings show that tourism and resource extraction are actually rather interrelated. Within mining tourism, such a related diversification occurs due to the spatial distribution of mining and tourism skills and the interaction between them. Thirdly, the location of tourism destinations is broadly governed by resource-extractive ...