Tourism smallholders’ perceived risks, resilience, and response strategies in the upper reaches of the Yihe River, China

Abstract

Rural tourism brings opportunities, risks and challenges to tourism smallholders. Exploring risk management strategies and capacity holds the key to strengthening household livelihood resilience and well-being in tourism-guided rural transition. By linking the sustainable livelihoods framework (SLF) and resilience thinking, a risk resilience framework was developed and employed to explore the nature of risks, levels of risk resilience, response strategies, and their interrelationship by using data from 262 households in the upper reaches of the Yihe River, China. The results showed that the tension between the market environment and low resilience shapes the main risks to the livelihood. There are significant correspondences between risk types and coping strategies. Additionally, perceived risks, livelihood resilience, and market imperfections in rural transformation jointly shaped the preferences of risk-response strategies and their variation among smallholders. The results provide abundant information for a better understanding of response strategies and future resilience building.

Keywords

• Marginal rural tourism destination
• Tourism-guided rural transformation
• Tourism smallholder
• Resilience
• Livelihood risks