Exploring Heterogeneous Tourism Development Paths: Cascade Effect or Co-evolution in Niagara?

Abstract: Tourism is often galvanised around a central theme based on a region's strengths in product supply and promotional opportunity, which usually results in an identifiable regional brand. However, this also hides the existing heterogeneity of tourism supply, especially in regions with an established brand. Securing long-term community economic development requires a broader focus since some unheralded tourism development paths may prove resilient over the long term and ultimately contribute to community development. This paper investigates the less central stakeholders in the Niagara region of Canada and explores how future studies might integrate marginal tourism stakeholders in studies of the regional tourism economy. Through semi-structured interviews with regional tourism stakeholders, the analysis of the Niagara region, based on perspectives of co-evolution from evolutionary economic geography, reveals a new perspective on tourism development by focussing on the place of marginal stakeholders in a region with a strong tourism brand. The region exhibits strong path dependence based on its industrial and agricultural legacy but long-term, organic, incremental processes of change within the region are creating new tourism development paths. These new paths co-evolve with the dominant tourism paths as well as other community development initiatives leading to positive change across the region.