On September 23-24, 2021 Institute of Economics and Rural Development of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences organized the final meeting of an international scientific project “RESTinBSR - Unlocking transformative ecotourism potential for sustainable regional development”, implemented under the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Seed Money funding scheme, project no. #S060. This last meeting was devoted for tourism development perspectives in Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Germany and Russia including discussions how to unlock the potential of such innovative form of tourism as transformative ecotourism. The conventional tourist is focused on traveling to exotic natural areas as a spectator. Transformative tourist has more goals aiming very deeply understand a travel destination's culture dealing with environmentally friendly and responsible behavior for self-transformation. So, the overall objective of “RESTinBSR” was to prepare the main project, which aims to support and develop ecotourism as alternative to the mass tourism.
During the final project meeting, together with the whole team of the project - Polish scientists Prof. Pawel Chmielinski, Dr. Tomasz Napierala, Dr. Katarzyna Leśniewska-Napierała, Dr. Konrad Czapiewski, Latvian scientists Prof. Aija Zobena, Dokt. Veronika Felcis, representative of Council of Municipalities of Sankt Petersburg Julija Slav, Annik Trauzettel, representative of the German ZEGG Community Center, as well as respective guest from the Lithuanian Ministry of Economy and Innovation Lidija Bajarūnienė, representative of Druskininkai municipality Antanas Urbonas, and Agne Jazepčikaitė-Gaidiene and Alvydas Varanis from the company "Sūrūs vėjai", Leipalingis manor local community, folk master Juozas Kavaliauskas from "Malūno kalvė", farmer Gražina Auguviene from "Augų ūkis", and other unique people of Druskininkai region took part in summarizing the results of the project and discussed prospects for further developments concerning the main project in the field.
RESTinBSR is lead by Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, Institute of Economics and Rural Development (Lithuania). Project partners: University of Latvia, Faculty of Social Sciences (Latvia); European Rural Development Network (ERDN) (Poland) and Council of Municipalities of Sankt Petersburg (Russia). The project also invited aassociated partners who hold potential to become partners for new main project: ZEGG – Center for Experimental Cultural and Social Design (Germany); The Association of Consultants in Cooperation Network (Sweden); Tourismusverband Mecklenburg-Vorpommern e. V. (Germany) and others.
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