The general objectives of the social economy parallel those of CBT, with both aiming to create community benefits (broadly defined as economic, social, and cultural) through a bottom-up process of local involvement in decision making, capacity building, and neoliberal economic diversification (Blackstock, 2005; Koster & Randall, 2005; Mair, 2006; Simmons, 1994). This represents a shift from the increased entrepreneurial involvement of governments in economic
development to a devolution of this responsibility to the local level and to the individual citizen (Harvey, 1989). Despite the philosophical similarities between CBT and the social economy, research into this alternate form of economic organization for the production and support of rural tourism lags. This paper considers the potential for the social economy as a way to realize CBT by investigating how social-economy enterprises are currently used within a rural Canadian context. The purpose of this paper is exploratory: to trace linkages between these two concepts and highlight specific applications. I define two broad areas where the social economy can be leveraged for rural CBT: first as a support structure for private development and second as a direct tourism product and service provider. Examples from within Canada are used to investigate benefits and constraints to the use of the social economy in a rural tourism context. This paper concludes with a discussion of the way forward—how Canadian rural communities can use these social-economy structures to facilitate rural CBT, and what the implications are for policy makers.
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