Erosive Governance, Fragile Geographies, Rural Tourism, Spatial Rent, Carrying-Capacity Breakdown, Digital Overexposure.

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 School of Management and Marketing, Massey Business School, Te Kura Whai Pakihi, Massey University, Private Bag 102904, North Shore, Auckland 0745, New Zealand

2 Department of Geography and Rural Planning, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

development, yet in ecologically fragile, peri-metropolitan settings it often produces the opposite. Existing scholarship examines the symptoms separately—overtourism, rural gentrification and digital tourism—leaving the political economy and governance mechanisms that connect them under-theorised. Drawing on a grounded theory study of mountain villages in Iran's Alborz region, this article asks why tourism became a vector of unsustainability. Following a constructivist grounded theory approach, the analysis draws on in-depth interviews with 72 residents, local officials and civil-society actors, coded through initial, focused and theoretical stages. It identifies three interrelated mechanisms: the institutional imposition of tourism space before places are prepared; the conversion of this fragmented context into spatial rent through selective, negotiable enforcement of law; and digitally accelerated overexposure that triggers ecological, infrastructural and managerial breakdown. Theorised as erosive governance in fragile geographies, this recursive process actively exhausts the capacities sustainability requires—showing that fragile destinations depend less on visitor numbers than on being governed before they are exposed.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Journal of Rural Research
Volume 17, Issue 1
April 2026
Pages 1-20

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History

  • Receive Date: 15 January 2026
  • Revise Date: 25 February 2026
  • Accept Date: 01 April 2026

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