Suchergebnisse

AbstractNowadays, second homes are important for rural development and rural communities in many parts of the world. Second home owners are more committed to the place than tourists and other occasional visitors. However, they are not counted as full members of the local community, which is often seen as a coherent group of like‐minded people. This study examines the concept of community in the context of second home owners in a popular tourist region of Finnish Lapland. The study is based on diaries kept for one year by ten second home owners. The diaries are analysed as narratives that record happenings that the writers see as worth narrating. They show that various social contacts as well as media and nature create the entirety of the attachment to the second home place. Social contact occurs in many places, from services to nature environments. Also residents' association seems to be an important forum of social influence. The authors suggest that more spaces for socialising are needed in order to have interaction between permanent residents and second home owners.

Socially sustainable tourism requires that the local people living in the vicinity of tourist destinations should be involved in local tourism planning. However, the realisation of this ideal evokes many questions. Tourism growth often seems to happen on its own terms, and it is inevitably nonlocal as customers' expectations and life-styles are of great importance. In this article, we ask what is the role of the local community in the evolution of tourist destinations and how do the locals see their possibilities to influence tourism development? These issues are examined through focus group interviews in three villages situated adjoining tourist destinations in Finnish Lapland. The interviews revealed that from the local point of view there have been different stages of development of participatory processes that can be analysed applying Richard Butler's tourism area life cycle theory. The increasing number of tourists seems to increase also the level of concern among local people regarding environmental and cultural issues. Changes in planning paradigms, legislation, and also in public attitudes increase the hopes of the locals that their voice will be better heard in future planning processes.

In Finland, there are almost 500,000 second homes and in some areas the number of second home owners exceeds that of permanent residents. Currently, second home owners are also spending more time in their second homes. If second home owners are not permanent residents, administration may exclude them from local institutions, and treat second home owners as only partial members of the community. It has been stated that municipal decision making and the role of the municipality as an actor in the local community should be broadened in order to strengthen democracy and the participation of its residents as a core of municipal self-administration. Hence, participating in communal decision making is mainly possible only for permanent residents. The issue is whether it is possible to change this situation via the municipalities' own reforms and state regulations. New municipal administration experiments have recently emerged in Finland. Here we study how the new local administrative model, the Communal District Committee, has affected local participation and local governance in a rural areas by exploring second home owners' opportunities to participate in local decision making and development processes. The data consists of documents, focus group discussions and a questionnaire. We used qualitative and quantitative methods in the data analysis. We found, on one hand, that permanent residents of villages recognise second home owners' hesitation to participate in local issues requiring planning and decision making. On the other hand, local-level communal decision making does not promote the participation of second home residents. On the basis of the findings of the study, we suggest that the municipal authorities should recognise the existence and importance of second home owners in the area, acknowledge them better in municipal plans and strategies, and offer them more resources and means to participate.