Tourism and Communities

This timely book critically explores and analyses the prospects and challenges that exist in tourism and community relations in different contexts, with a focus on island, rural and urban environments within Nordic tourism.

The book explores core topics from both positive and negative tourism development practices, including employment and income creation, diversification of local economy, well-being and quality of life, infrastructure and services support, revitalization of culture, cultural learning, and natural and cultural resource conservation. The volume utilises case studies and real-world examples from the Nordic context, which are good practices in community building, investments in social programmes and infrastructure and economies, discussing potential implications and take-aways that can be transferred to other regions. The book delves into community perspectives beyond those of DMOs and the local community as service providers or objects of visitor experiences. It provides new insights into how the community-tourism relationships may change, and how community actors can be drivers of change as well as the complexities and ambiguities involved, with both positive and negative impacts of tourism, conflicting goals, etc.

This volume will be valuable reading for researchers, academics and students interested in sustainable tourism.

Narcís Bassols i Gardella is a Lecturer in Sustainable Destination Development at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland, Sweden. He researches cultural and urban tourism, communitarian aspects of tourism, destination development, and sustainability in hospitality. He has recently written about tourism entrepreneurship and emerging destinations via several tourism cases published by CABI. Other recent publications include his papers about the frameworks and ideas on historic centres in Latin America (Journal of Heritage Tourism), about racial segregation in heritage cities (Historia, University of Santiago), about the shifts and evolutions of guided tours in the post-pandemic context (International Journal of Tourism Cities), and about the possibilities of adaptive reuse of heritage buildings (Journal of Urban Culture Research).

Ulrika Persson-Fischier is a lecturer at Uppsala university, Sweden. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Oslo. Her research includes sustainability, co-creative methodologies, entrepreneurship, and tourism education, with a focus on cruise tourism, community empowerment, and Nordic settings like Iceland and Gotland in the Baltic, but also other islands like Rapa Nui in the Pacific. Recent publications include articles on open-space methodology for community tourism development (Scandinavian Journal of Tourism and Hospitality), responsible cruise tourism in Iceland, cruise tourism in the Pacific, and the role of authenticity for sustainable tourism development.

Jarkko Saarinen is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oulu, Finland. He also serves as Distinguished Professor (Sustainability Management) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include regional and local development, sustainability in tourism, tourism and climate change, resilience studies, tourism-community relations, and nature conservation studies. His recent publications include co-authored and co-edited books: Handbook on Tourism Governance (2025, Elgar), Climate Change and Tourism in Southern Africa (2022, Routledge), Southern African Perspectives in Sustainable Tourism Management (2022, Springer), Tourism, Change and the Global South (2021, Routledge), and Resilient Destinations (2019, Routledge).