GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH ›› 2018, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (12): 2383-2398.doi: 10.11821/dlyj201812002

• Commemorative Pages for Professor Penghua • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Collaborative governance model of tourism urbanization in rural areas: A case study of Shuiji village in Taining county, Fujian

Hua PENG(), Ruixiang HE, Shixiu WENG()   

  1. School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
  • Received:2018-06-24 Revised:2018-09-01 Online:2018-12-20 Published:2018-12-20
  • About author:

    Author: Shi Zhenqin (1988-), PhD, specialized in regional development and land space management in mountain areas. E-mail: kevinszq@163.com

    *Corresponding author: Deng Wei (1957-), Professor, specialized in mountain environment and regional development.

    E-mail: dengwei@imde.ac.cn

Abstract:

Tourism has long been adopted as a means to revitalizing and urbanizing rural areas, and its significant role recently is mirrored in the Rural Revitalization Strategy. Actually, in some villages, such as the Shuiji village of Taining county, Fujian, which is selected in this study, tourism not only plays an essential role in revitalizing the local area. A collaborative governance model has also emerged over the course of the urbanization, which, nevertheless, still fails to seduce many scholars and researchers insofar. This article, thus, contributes to nuanced insights into this new governance model as well as the mechanism of tourism urbanization in Shuiji village. Specifically, despite embracing multi-stakeholders' collaboration and negotiation, this model, still highlights, if hardly prioritize, the roles of a few key agents, notably, but not exclusively, villagers, overseas corporations and the local government. Precisely, it should be first recognized that the local state usually plays an essential part in integrating resources, initiating institutional construction, directing local economic development and negotiating with different stakeholders, whose interests might vary from one to another. Whilst, possessing their land rights and modernized life style villages are usually inspired to actively interact and negotiate with other stakeholders. In recent years, it has already become the fashion that Chinese local governments strive to attract overseas developers and corporations to invest and manage tourism projects in rural areas. Their inclusion might stimulate locals' income. Nevertheless, to realize the collaborative governance mode is never easy, and its success apparently relies upon multiple factors, primarily including effective institutional supply, reasonable division of labor, flexible design of property right system, market rules for realizing distributive justice and rational interaction and balance of power among stakeholders. As a joint effort of all these factors, it is most likely to achieve common interests among stakeholders in rural areas. And resources could be redistributed effectively either, so as to respectively facilitate the urbanization progress and local tourism and economic development. All in all, the collaborative governance, to a considerable extent, could be treasured as an effective way to promote rural tourism urbanization. And tourism-led urbanization mode is unambiguously quite useful in enriching the case studies concerning new-type urbanization in rural areas and paving the way for effective governance of rural transformation in the foreseeable future.

Key words: tourism urbanization, collaborative governance, rural revitalization, development mechanism