Marginalized mountainous areas across Europe face compounding challenges: peripherality, depopulation, population aging, limited accessibility, weak institutional support, and the gradual erosion of local identities. Yet these regions are also rich repositories of intangible cultural heritage—traditional crafts, gastronomy, music, and oral traditions—that remain underleveraged for sustainable local development. Creative tourism, a form of cultural tourism in which visitors actively participate in place-based practices (for example, learning a craft from a local artisan or cooking regional dishes with residents), offers a potential pathway for addressing these challenges while valorizing local knowledge and engaging communities as coproducers. Grounded in neo-endogenous development theory and informed by regenerative tourism principles, this study examines stakeholder motivations and visions for creative tourism as a regenerative strategy, comparing local contexts in Serbia, Croatia, Portugal, and Bulgaria. Thematic analysis of semistructured interviews with governance bodies, public authorities, tourism professionals, and researchers reveals both shared challenges and context-specific dynamics. Although creative tourism is widely recognized as a promising opportunity, its development is constrained by insufficient institutional backing, the absence of cohesive strategies, and gaps in accessibility, marketing, coordination, infrastructure, and workforce development. The study contributes context-sensitive strategies, an emerging conceptualization of creative tourism in mountain settings, and actionable policy recommendations.
Across Europe one finds limited opportunities for rural communities to articulate their own visions and priorities, as planning processes are frequently to -down technocratic or externally driven. Recent work positions participatory visioning as core to sustainable rural transformation when it is explicitly cocreated and justice oriented. In this article, we present the development of a structured facilitation tool to support rural and mountain communities in articulating cocreated visions for their future—the Vision Workshop (VW). The VW moves communities from voice to vision through a staged, metaphor-driven process that balances imagination and everyday pragmatism. We report on the pilot implementation of the VW in 3 diverse European contexts: Gospić, Croatia; Faraján, Spain; and the Deatnu Watershed, Finland/Norway. The 3 cases demonstrate that participatory visioning, when theoretically grounded and carefully facilitated, can act as an inclusive and replicable tool to move communities from being merely heard to cocreating situated, governable futures, a central tenant of the EU rural development policy. In addition, in the pilots, the VW operationalized a culturally sensitive form of testimonial justice, providing structured forums where marginalized voices could be heard and validated. The key lesson from the pilots is that the VW's value depends on embedding its outputs within longer term, resourced planning cycles; we therefore recommend that practitioners pair the workshop with explicit attention to participant diversity, the power relations among stakeholders, and institutional follow-through, so that articulated visions can translate into governable rural transformation.
Review of: Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age. By Marc Landry. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2025.
Digital transformation in agriculture increasingly depends on high-capacity broadband, yet mountain areas face persistent structural disadvantages. This study quantifies locational and gender-based disparities in digital infrastructure among farmsteads in the Austrian Alps. The study examines variations in broadband availability and quality between mountain and nonmountain farmsteads and between male-managed and female-managed farmsteads. A systematic, gender-sensitive approach combined geospatial broadband data from Austria's Broadband Atlas with farm-level information from the Integrated Administration and Control System. Broadband availability, bandwidth thresholds, and gender coverage ratios were analyzed using explorative descriptive statistics and geographic information system–based spatial visualization across mountain and urban–rural typologies. The analysis used 3 Liaison Entre Actions de Développement de l'Économie Rurale regions to illustrate this terrain variability. Results show that all farmsteads in nonmountain areas have landline and/or mobile access, whereas 2 of 10,000 farmsteads in mountain areas have no access. High-capacity (landline and/or mobile network) connections (≥100 Mbps) are less common for farmsteads in mountain than in nonmountain regions, and gigabit access remains concentrated in accessible areas. Although gender differences in broadband access and quality are present, they are generally modest. These findings indicate that universal broadband targets have not yet ensured equitable inclusion for remote mountain farmsteads, where spatial inequalities persist over gender differences. Spatial disparities remain the dominant dimension of the digital divide in mountain agriculture.
Review of: Nosotros, los Andes [We, the Andes]. Edited by Rebecca Jarman and Victoria Vargas-Downing. Bogotá, Colombia: Artificio, 2024.
