Marine Tourism Development in the Arkhangelsk Region, Russian Arctic: Stakeholder’s Perspectives

Abstract

The Arkhangelsk region is a strategic area for cruise tourism development in the Russian European Arctic. The region offers its domestic and foreign visitors a large number of unique natural, cultural, and historical sites and provides an opportunity to explore coastal settlements and the region’s remote areas. However, it can be said that despite the variety of existing national and regional institutional arrangements, as well as the industry’s managerial practices, the sustainable development of marine tourism in the region is highly reliant on local stakeholders, such as local authorities, travel companies, and local providers of hosting/tourism activities. In order to examine the sustainability of the current development practices, this chapter uses the findings from qualitative interviews to understand how cruise tourism in the Solovetsky archipelago is managed locally and regionally. Our study emphasizes the need to implement a communication model based on the cooperation and engagement of all relevant stakeholders as a platform to address sustainability issues inherent in the growth of cruise tourism. The study thus helps to address the problems associated with cruise tourism development in the Arctic and to deepen the discussion related to the peculiarities of tourism destination development in the Russian European Arctic.