Analyzing the potential for tourism to promote sustainable economic development on the Lower North Shore of Quebec

Over-fishing and poor resource management in the northwest Atlantic have led to a drastic decline in the fishery, forcing many communities in eastern Canada to turn to new sources of livelihood. Residents on the Lower North Shore of Quebec are responding to the fisheries crisis by identifying alternative economic development strategies, including a small scale ecotourism industry centred around some of the oldest seabird sanctuaries in North America. Policy makers and communities hope that this type of tourism will generate revenue and employment while also protecting the natural areas upon which local residents depend. Unfortunately, little is known at this time about the ability of ecotourism to live up to this promise. In this context, the central goal of this thesis is to examine the feasibility ecotourism to act as a mechanism for sustainable economic development In order to meet this objective, this research draws upon and refines past attempts by geographers to grapple with the links between the tourism industry and destination development. The thesis shows that the dominant theoretical frameworks of the 1980s cannot provide us with an adequate understanding of the rapidly evolving tourism industry and its role in regional development processes and protected area management. Instead, this thesis adopts post-Fordist theories of tourism development to conduct a microscale analysis on the impacts and underlying structure of the ecotourism industry and its linkages to protected areas and local communities in the region. By synthesizing quantitative and qualitative evidence in the realist tradition, a systematic methodology is generated to argue that a bottom-up, multi-scale network approach provides the greatest potential for promoting more sustainable forms of tourism development.