ABSTRACT
Tourism is often purported to be a solution to economic decline arising from restructuring of other sectors of the economy. This is particularly true for remote places perceived as lacking alternative options for development. Thus, tourism development in peripheral areas is often triggered as a result of crisis in other sectors (Baum 1999; Hall and Boyd 2005; Hall 2007; Jóhannesson and Huijbens 2010). Tourism development rarely, however, provides the solution it is supposed to – either by failing to deliver socioeconomic change (Hall 2007) or by simply replacing one mono-sectoral dependency (e.g., extractive industries) with another one (e.g., tourism) (Schmallegger and Carson 2010). Therefore, it is necessary to explore whether tourism offers dynamic development or is destined to decline in the long-term.
