The sustainability of rural diversification into tourism: a study in the Italian regions of the «convergence» objective

This paper deals with the issue of the sustainability of policies of agricultural diversification towards tourism which is emphasised in the programmes of rural development in many agricultural regions, like those of the “convergence objective” on which the analysis concentrated. In the paper it is pointed out that the way the regional authorities incentivate or assist farms to diversify into tourism could have implications for sustainability, examined in this study thorough the presence of five indicators. The weight of these per region, obtained from the combination of structural variables (number of accommodation facilities and of beds) and of flows (arrivals and presences) registered in farm tourism, was estimated by applying Index Decomposition Analysis (IDA) to the variation in presences recorded in the period 2002-2011. By introducing the institutional aspect of the sustainability of rural development processes, the paper also identifies “integrated rural tourism” as the most effective model of tourism diversification for farms, since this brings the focus back onto the local food producing system.