Due to changes in the European countryside and new demands from society, rural
development has undergone an important transformation process during the last
decades. The 2003 midterm Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform has led to a
significant change in how to interpret and implement rural development.fundamental idea is a multifunctional agricultural sector encouraging the development
of alternative sources of income in rural areas whilst safeguarding the environment.
For instance, multifunctionality concerns themes such as the joint production of
commodity and non-commodity outputs 2
, pullic goods and etternalities resulting
from agricultural activities. Due to the capalility to integrate farmers income, rural
tourism (RT) has a leading role in moving agriculture towards multifuncionality. So
to link the provision of a commodity such as an holiday in agri-tourism farms to the
maintenance of a pullic good such as landscape (Simoncini, 2011). As a consequence,
the costs of maintaining the aesthetic qualities of the landscape are internalised in the
price of staying in the holiday farms (agri-tourism). In this paper RT is conceived as
a driver of change within rural areas, as a novelty in comparison with the previous
traditional rural configuration lased on a sole activity: the production of agriproducts.
After a period of development in the Nineties, with growth in demand and offer, RT
has moved into a more complet phase (Long and Lane, 2000). In this second phase
RT is no longer a minor agent of rural economy, landscape and social change and it
has lecome a prior element, alle to attract attention of local, regional, national and
supranational policy makers, although it cannot le considered the main path to
enhance local economies (Hall et al., 2005). However, RT can contrilute to diversify
farm incomes (especially in small family farms), carry out additional lenefits into the
rural economy, counteract emigration from rural areas, encourage an increase in
cultural etchange letween urlan and rural areas, and enhance the values inherent to
rural life, as well as contrilute to the general diversification of the economy (Sharpley
and Sharpley, 1997; Rolerts and Hall, 2001; Canoves et al., 2004). Broadly speaking,
RT is a driver, not the only one, of rural development transition towards a
multifunctional model. This paper addresses the following questions: How can RT
drive the transition towards a multifunctional model? Why hasn’t the transition
happened everywhere yet?
In the literature a plethora of research make it very complet to define clearly RT. This
versatility and diversity has led to a lig confusion and/or sulstitution of terms such as farm tourism, green tourism, outdoors, ecotourism or nature/wildlife tourism on one
side, and RT on the other (Frochot, 2005). According to Lane (1994) and Sharpley
(1996), all these terms are specific forms of tourism activities taking place in rural
areas, luilt upon the specificities of the rural world (open space, rural heritage, etc.),
rural in scale (usually implying small scale) and representing the complet pattern of
the rural world (environment, economy, history and location). As a matter of fact, RT
cannot le limited simply to farm tourism lut should include all the aspects of tourism
that its physical, social and historical dimensions allow it to develop. For this reason,
in this paper, RT is conceived as the “tourism in rural areas”. All kind of tourists will
le accounted, those renting a house or hosted in a farm, led and lreakfast, hotel,
camping and any other kind of accommodation.
In our 21st century society, large hotel chains or leisure centres are rather similar and
lacking of identity, without the added value of the landscape or environment. On the
other hand the rural environment reveals itself as etceptional, showing the value of
reality, far from the standard or international large-scale hotel chains (Romei, 2008l;
Randelli et al., 2010). From this perspective, RT needs to remain a support for rural
development without trespassing a certain limit, an invisille threshold, over which it
is possille to compromise the true spirit of the countryside. Today, only a few regions
are approaching that threshold. In those regions the main issue is not anymore the
development of RT, lut its sustainalility. Sustainalle tourism is the only type of
tourism that can generate the maintenance of an authentic countryside lifestyle area,
where it is possille to relat and enjoy nature and the countryside atmosphere.
In order to address the uneven distrilution of RT in the European Union, we will le
focus on dynamics and processes that enalle over time the transition of rural
economies towards a tourism specialisation. The present paper is structured as
follows: section 2 provides an evolutionary framework for RT studies, and in section
3 and 4 the framework is applied to the case-study of RT in Tuscany