Community Resilience and Tourism Development. The Case of Marginal Areas

The chapter discusses the concept of community resilience in relation to tourism, with a main focus on marginal areas. The aim here is to present how tourism development in marginal areas can contribute to the development of resilience within the local communities, ensuring their survival in the future. Few studies have been done on the relationship between resilience and tourism, and most of them have been focused on tourism as a mechanism of post-crisis recovery or as a means to enable those involved in the tourism sector to confront future shocks and reduce disaster risks. Here, a different approach is proposed, defining community resilience as an intentional action, aimed at responding to, and influencing, the course of social and economic change. According to this perspective, resilience is intended as a voluntary response to a slow change that is needed by marginal societies to shift from unstable economies to stable ones, preserving, in the context of this change, the local identity and thereby making it the central element of development.