Planning for Growth? Re-thinking the Rural Tourism Opportunity1

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Mair/Canadian Society of Extension 2001 4 community they want to protect, build upon and prevent from continuing. While this process requires facilitation, care is taken to ensure that those participating are in control of all decisions through consensus. The next stages of the community visioning exercise involves slotting tourism development into the created vision and devising strategies about how to reach this goal. While the research is still at early stages, there are many exciting instances of collaboration, enhanced understanding and mutual respect that form over the course of this particular exercise. Participants in two of these exercises have determined that it should be undertaken again with as many people from the community as possible. The challenge remains in terms of engendering the initiative and energy to design a flexible, communitybased tourism planning process but these first efforts reveal a buy-in which helps to ensure the momentum is indigenous and self-directed. Conclusion In their work on collaborative recreation and park services planning, Hope and Dempsey (2000) have utilised community decision conferences and conclude that this type of planning: should represent what people want, project imaginatively what might be, and recognize realistically what is possible. It must also actively involve the stakeholders and seek to build consensus around shared community values in order to achieve genuine commitment to implementation. (p. 63-4) As researchers and planners investigate the role of tourism in rural development, attention must be paid not just to the players in the community and the importance of inclusivity, but also on the context. As was mentioned earlier, tourism is being introduced in small communities around the world as the quick fix for development ills. Tourism is being asked to generate a plethora of benefits for communities and thus must be taken seriously. For example, as part of its rural jobs strategy and to encourage development in rural areas, the provincial government in Ontario earmarked $30 million dollars for rural projects - over $7 million of which went to rural tourism projects. That number indicates that nearly onethird of rural development funding is steering rural tourism growth. The appeal of tourism for rural development fits alongside the ideals of entrepreneurial growth insofar as it means the government can take a smaller role. As is shown above, however, entrepreneurially driven tourism leads to problems in rural communities and so must be steered much more carefully than first considered. 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