Abstract
Agritourism has grown rapidly in many countries worldwide. However, for all this success,
little is known about the concrete implementation, actual extent, and effectiveness of public and
private agritourism support measures aimed at keeping up farming and promoting agritourism.
Hence, the objective of this study is to provide an overview and a comparison of agritourism supports
and policies in different countries. To this purpose, specific political, legal, financial, and promotional
instruments for agritourism have been investigated. The focus is on three countries with strong
agritourism sectors and different socio-cultural characteristics: Italy, the USA, and South Africa.
The analysis of these case study areas is motivated by examination of agritourism from different
continents with a diverging status of development as well as history. Italy and the USA are two
countries with well-established and successful agritourism sectors; however, these are based on very
different framework conditions, resulting in specific development paths and various supportive
driving factors. South Africa has been included as a representative case study of a developing country
where agritourism operations are growing rapidly through the support of an active private sector
association. By assessing commonalities and differences in public and private support backgrounds
in three different continents, the present study represents the first exploratory attempt to understand
the influences of public and private national and regional framework conditions for agritourism
development. Our findings suggest that both public and private supports contribute to success;
however, clear criteria and further research are needed in order to fully understand the implications.