Political-economic transition in Georgia and its implications for tourism in Svaneti

Abstract

Private tourism entrepreneurship relies on special knowledge of the service sector with a strong focus on individual action and a general service mentality. The organization and regulation of tourism in post-socialist European countries experienced a shift from being state-driven to being determined by individual entrepreneurs. Yet in some cases, the adoption of the new entrepreneurial business principles is contested by different cultural understandings of how tourism should be 'produced'. With examples from the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia (Svaneti) we will demonstrate that these different understandings can play a major role in creating barriers for developing community-based tourism. Shortly after the transition to the market economy, a number of different small-scale, community-based tourism projects emerged, with individual entrepreneurship contesting the traditional values of hospitality in these regions (predominantly based on religious and 'tribal' values and norms rather than purely on entrepreneurial values). The methods used for this preliminary study of post-socialist tourism development included a short-term, mobile ethnography consisting of semi-structured interviews of tourism producers in the region, participant observation, as well as mapping occupancy of buildings according to unoccupied, agriculture and agritourism and second homes categories based on the condition of the gardens. Further changes in the political-economic framework have now shifted the focus towards larger-scale tourism developments supported by public-private partnerships. This paper analyses the impacts of these political-economic changes on the development of community-based tourism in Svaneti and explores in particular the friction between collective traditions and individual entrepreneurship in the experience economy of transition countries and its relationship with regional economic growth and rural depopulation.

Keywords

• Tourism
• Post-socialism
• Transition
• Individual entrepreneurship
• Hospitality
• Georgia