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It can be concluded from the interviews that the tourist hosts have a high propensity to conditional
cooperation and are capable of producing shared sustainable benefits for their community. Each
participant is confident in the reciprocity of other tourist hosts in the community and agrees that
main dilemmas in their practice involve communication with national level or global actors. Thus,
they support the acceptance of a new behavioral theory, that “if enough individuals initially
cooperate, they slowly obtain benefits from the [natural resources], and levels of cooperation grow”
(Vollan & Ostrom 2010: 924). In the projects that are facing them right now, each of the
interviewees are leaders for increased cooperation and increased sustainability of the community,
and are slowly changing the acceptance in the rest of the community to manage and maintain the
common natural resources locally.
This does not mean that they are immune to disturbances like distance to market, lack of
infrastructure and service and an aging population. The national level system still makes the rules for
their work. This could be interpreted in several ways: 1) rules established by an external authority
that “crowd out” the group’s motivation to cooperate (Vollan & Ostrom 2010: 924) and makes
them pessimistic about the future of the community; 2) a systematic lock-in that disables the
community’s resilience to handle shocks or expand in their work, “My hands are tied to the system
that I work within” (Love, participant) or; 3) a system that provides opportunities for their work and
cooperation in terms of e.g. financial support for development projects, leasing of land and free
access to use land for tourism and own recreation activities. Adding to the complexity of things, the
answer is indeed that the national level system provides pathways to all three options. In the future
vision deducted from the interviewees’ accounts one thing is clear: sustainable tourism goals cannot
be disconnected from the goal of sustaining the community. Thus can tourism function as the
empowerment needed to activate drivers for sustainable development of Gunnarsbyn on a local
level.
Conclusions
This study is descriptive of the infrastructural and demographic vulnerability involved in livelihoods
and tourism development in European Arctic regions. The main outtake of this study is that tourism
is a strategy to cope with geographical and political vulnerability but the problem is that the tourism
sector is also vulnerable in itself. The interviewees have confirmed this by emphasizing that both
their community and the tourism industry are of low priority in national politics.
In order to explain how tourist hosts understand sustainable use of common natural resources in
their context, the analysis included accounts of (1) their current practice, as a description of an
ongoing practical accomplishment in reaction to both local and global sustainability challenges; (2)
the vulnerability involved with tourism practice in this place and; (3) their dependence on common
pool resources. It became clear that vulnerability is involved with the entire complex system of their
choice of lifestyle and practice. The tourist hosts do not see their situation of sharing common
natural resources as a dilemma when communicating with other actors within the community. The
dilemma situation is visible when communicating their needs to the larger system. The