The management of rural amenities in relation to the activities they support - the case of rural tourism

Abstract

The management of territorial and environmental amenities involves a framework which associates public action, collective action and private coordination. Public action can take an " indirect form " including organisation of some interactions and support to some collective actions. Tourist actors are presumed to be favourable to the management of amenities, which are resources for them. The question is then to assess how they can be more involved in that management. The article presents the analytical framework of Research in Environmental Management (RGTE). It proposes a typology of the tourist actors in their diversity, and mentions their ambiguous relation to environment. The article presents three case studies which were realised in the french Massif Central. These cases suggest further hypotheses : the implication, sometimes individual but rarely collective and spontaneous, of specialised tourist actors in environmental management, the importance of actors qualified as " mixed " (who associate explicitly touristic and other objectives such as pedagogy...), the importance of public actors, in their evolutive context, the necessity of using appropriate tools in order to obtain the involvment a whole of actors. A need of further knowledge is to be stressed, about the linkage between some different logics, and about methods for the public and collective action.