Governing the Tourism Commons: Can Self-governing Institutions Ensure the Continuation of the Rural Tourism Life Cycle?

Rural tourism is regarded as an important development strategy in many countries. However, some rural tourist destinations are facing decline after a period of prosperity. Based on the interaction between local residents involved in rural tourism and the common pool resources on which rural tourism depends, this paper discusses the reasons leading to the unsustainable development of rural tourism and proposes solutions to the tragedy of the tourism commons to realize a more sustainable development of rural tourism. This paper uses the data collected in 2017 from 56 villages across 13 provinces of China and obtains the following results using econometric methods. In the absence of a self-governing institutions, there was a nonlinear inverted U-shaped relationship between the income of local residents involved in rural tourism and their scale, indicating that the increase of local residents involved in rural tourism only increased their incomes in the initial stage of rural tourism development. However, with the continuous increase of local residents involved in rural tourism, the tragedy of the tourism commons led to lower income from rural tourism. In the presence of a self-governing institutions, there was a positive correlation between the income and scale of local residents involved in rural tourism, which indicates that the self-governing institutions successfully overcame the tragedy of the tourism commons and ultimately supported the continuous surge of income from rural tourism. This paper also provides a new way for people to understand the development and evolution of the tourism area life cycle theory.