ABSTRACT
Tourism has become targeted in many borderlands as a precursor to more intensive cross-border administrative contact, sociocultural relationship building, and economic development. However, tourism scholarship continues to raise critical notes about the ease with which positive impacts could be achieved with tourism. Identified complexities, such as the sector’s notorious fragmentation and uneven power distribution, spill over to and are, arguably, even reinforced in borderland settings. Dealing with these issues requires integrative planning and managing of tourism across borders. By combining the literature on tourism governance and cross-border spatial planning, the author looks at the opportunities, challenges, and barriers to transfrontier destinations from the perspective of governance, planning, and management. The author shows that planning and managing tourism in transborder areas is a double-edged sword. While the tourism sector provides clear opportunities to reach spatial development objectives in borderlands, inclusivity in tourism planning and management is difficult to achieve even without considering border-related cooperation barriers, let alone in cross-border contexts. Yet, such a systematic participatory planning is a prerequisite if one wants to move beyond individual tourism project development to reach higher-order objectives across borders such as integrative resource management and facilitating knowledge exchange and innovation.
