Recreation and Rural Development in Norway: Nature Versus Culture

This paper explores the author’s observations on the barriers, risks, and, to a greater extent, opportunities associated with natural amenity-led or recreation-led rural development in Norway, which others might term rural tourism. It seeks to establish an argument for a refocusing of rural amenity-led development away from traditional ‘‘highamenity’’ areas and toward previously overlooked places, thus geographically and substantively broadening the potential for this type of development in Norway. This change in orientation seeks to avoid the tourism-dependence that has emerged and is similar to older forms of naturalresource extraction dependence. Finally, the paper presents two cultural contradictions of cuisine that constitute barriers to the proposed broader geographical and cultural development of recreation and tourism in rural Norway.