Turismo e desenvolvimento territorial na Quarta Colônia - RS - Brasil: uma abordagem na perspectiva do capital social

Abstract

This thesis has as its central theme tourism and territorial development in the perspective of social capital, in order to analyze the extent to which obstacles to realizing the potential and the consolidation of tourism in the territory covering the Quarta Colônia, RS, Brazil, are related to the notion of social capital. The specific objectives are: to present a brief profile of some of the enterprises and entrepreneurs that cater to tourist services in order to gather information about the origin of the enterprises, the main products offered on the public that frequents such establishments and their strategies disclosure; investigate what is the vision of the actors who are involved with tourism in Cologne on Wednesday this activity in order to identify whether and how to establish forms of joint and collective action; identify recurrence or not the bonds of trust, cooperation and collective action between the actors involved in tourism in the Quarta Colônia; investigate whether and how information, communication actions and training are established and shared among the stakeholders involved with tourism in the Quarta Colônia. The theoretical framework used to aid in this understanding is based mainly on the notions: a) territorial development, b) local clusters, c) social capital and d) tourism and tourism system. As theoretical operational categories for understanding the productive organization of tourism at micro Fourth of Cologne and the formation of social capital brings up the relations of trust, cooperation and collective action, market strategies, actions, information, communication, innovation and training. The methodological approach taken to this research is the case study, with the analysis locus shaft Santa Maria Quarta Colônia/ RS/Brasil, with the time frame the last decades from 1995 (founding of the Consortium for Sustainable Development Region's Quarta Colônia). The field research, contemplating the steps of observations and a questionnaire with visitors and semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders, was held from 2010 to 2014 As a result, we verified the interactions between local actors representative of the business sector, governments municipal and third sector representatives analyzing the actions of the same with respect to operational categories previously and already put its business in the tourism system microregion. It is inferred that are fragile relations between the actors, almost non-existent collective action, we identified reports individualistic and competition between them, thus making it weak social capital in the micro being one of the obstacles to the development of tourism in the territory.