Dependency and agency in peripheral tourism development

The notion of dependency provides useful insights into tourism’s relationships between peripheral and core regions. Overly simple applications of this idea can be deterministic, however, suggesting that tourism development inevitably entails exploitation of the periphery by the core. This study in peripheral tourism development in relation to human agency, strategic calculation and strategic selectivity. These relationships are evaluated for tourism’s core-periphery relations between a main island and a nearby smaller and more peripheral island. It was found that the peripheral island of Gozo exhibited dependency on the main island of Malta, but Gozo’s actors also exerted agency within various constraints. Consideration is given to both economic and political dimensions of these relationships.