Limits to mass tourism’s effects in rural peripheries

Economic linkages between mass tourism cores and rural peripheries are widely proposed as developmental. This article adopts a livelihoods approach to investigate the influence of a major Cambodian tourism destination on its rural hinterland. A quantitative pre-study of three rural villages indicated that links were mainly indirect, through labour migration. The qualitative main phase found villagers adapting skills and social networks to a range of employments in diverse locations. Poor households in the rural periphery were thus already connected to wider economies with tourism playing a distinctive low-risk, low-return role in their livelihood strategies. Policy on poverty and tourism should be informed by an understanding of rural households’ existing livelihood portfolios and the strategic contingent decisions which shape them.