CBT in Rural Peripheral Areas: An Italian Case Study of Territorial Engagement and Requalification

This chapter is aimed at addressing the debate about the critical role of community engagement in tourism in peripheral rural contexts, from a sociological perspective. In these areas, tourism is one of the tools that might support communities’ resilience within a more comprehensive territorial re-qualification. During the last few decades, rural regions have witnessed the bad effects of emigration and abandonment, becoming the epitome of marginalization. Nowadays, because of a new sensibility towards both cultural and environmental values, they might turn into interesting destinations where a sustainable management of tourism could be carried on. The choice of sustainability represents a co-evolutionary process involving changes in stakeholders’ needs and wants, in institutions as well as in culture and practices. At the same time, it might encourage the enhancement of places that have to be completely reinvented. In this chapter, some destinations of southern Italy (in Basilicata region) will be analyzed through the method of the case-study design. In such contexts, the concept of community itself has to be completely revised in order to favor and manage community based tourism (CBT) processes. Instead of being considered as an exclusively indigenous and endogenous phenomenon – that is as a group of resident people whose identity is defined in terms of traditional values and local borders – the community is meant as a “place-based hub” whose borders definition is fluid and in a continuous making. The place and its inner sense become an essential issue as they are the arena where the community develops itself as well as important social changes. People gather around the perceived idea of the place and work together to make that place a better and more liveable one. Therefore, CBT is the result of a human encounter and constant contamination between the past and the future conditions of living, between those who have roots in that place and never moved, those who have returned and those who choose to move and live there. The encounter is the stimulus for (re)creating the best conditions for living by taking care of the environment as well as of the social relations and the cultural heritage. Tourists are an essential part of these processes as they are co-creators of the sense of place. Actually, there is no real border between being a resident or a tourist when a destination is a place of crossing and the community is a flexible, liquid and permeable social entity.