David Vail

Property rights and sustainable nature tourism: adaptation and mal-adaptation in Dalarna (Sweden) and Maine (USA)

Abstract Tourism is viewed in many industrial nations as an environmentally friendly way to revitalize distressed rural economies and communities. In the forest regions of Dalarna and interior Maine, hopes are pinned on nature-based tourism, with the presumption that natural capital is underutilized. This paper explores the potential and pitfalls of nature tourism as a basis for sustainable rural development in regions where most land is held privately but quasi-open access for recreation has been either a right (Dalarna) or a customary entitlement (Maine). The paper applies theories of common pool resources and impure public goods to show that both property regimes are mal-adapted for sustainable nature tourism. Limited exclusion combined with rivalness in land uses mis-aligns incentives facing landowners, tourists, and recreation businesses. Short-term effects include congestion, reduced economic opportunity, and depressed production of non-recreational goods. Longer-term effects include environmental degradation and weak incentives for value-added investment. Tourism development is further impeded by a scale mis-match between small ownerships and large efficient recreation management units. The analysis suggests that sustainable nature tourism faces four land use challenges.

Institutional Factors Influencing the Size and Structure of Tourism: Comparing Dalarna (Sweden) and Maine (USA)

This paper explains why neither Maine, USAs comparatively laissez faire economic and land use institutions, nor Dalarna, Swedens more heavily regulated economy, seems well designed to make tourism a powerful economic development engine. The paper focuses on three clusters of institutions that have a major influence on tourisms scale, economic structure, and long-term sustainability. Labour laws and labour market institutions are important determinants of tourism employment, job quality, product mix, production methods, and regional competitiveness. Land ownership and property rights influence both the incentives facing landowners, tourists, and tourism businesses and stresses on ecosystem carrying capacity. Commodity taxes affect the absolute and relative prices of various tourist services and, via feedback effects on demand, influence tourisms aggregate scale, activity mix and transportation/location patterns. The paper employs institutional contrasts between Dalarna and Maine to frame hypotheses that will guide a larger comparative study of sustainable tourism in forest regions. Perhaps most controversially, we hypothesise that Swedens venerable right of common access (allemansrätten), as currently implemented, impedes sustainable tourism development. An appendix sketches the current state of tourism in the two regions.

Uneven Regional Development: An Introduction to This Issue

areas. Rapid and disruptive resource or industrial development elsewhere induces opposition from local economic interests. People in depressed areas such as Atlantic Canada, the Italian Mezzogiorno and Appalachia grow restive as program after program fail to alleviate their plight. The left has generally welcomed regionally-based militancy, but the fear persists that regional issues may divide the working class. As radical political economists, we wish to respond to these situations, but our analyses are themselves underdeveloped. There are few applicable discussions of uneven spatial development, or of class formation and conflict within a spatial dimension. Those that exist have been focused on cases