Steering change: universities and adaptive rural tourism in Azheke, China

This paper advances a critical rethinking of rural tourism governance by foregrounding its affective, relational, and negotiated dimensions. Drawing on seven years of embedded autoethnographic fieldwork in Azheke Village, a UNESCO-listed Hani settlement in Yunnan, China, we examine the role of universities as deeply implicated actors in the co-production of alternative governance regimes. It situates governance not as a technocratic exercise in institutional design but as a lived process shaped by memory, moral economies, and symbolic authority. The Azheke Plan—a university-led initiative resisting capital-driven tourism through a “Three Nos” policy (no leasing, no selling, no capitalization)—provides the empirical grounding. Rather than relying on formal enforcement mechanisms, institutional durability relies on cultural narratives, ritual legitimacy and affective trust. Villagers’ compliance and contestation unfolded through kinship networks, informal adaptations, and subtle acts of negotiation, reflecting a mode of governance that transcended the binaries of resistance and compliance. This study challenges the prevailing conceptions of universities as external consultants and neutral knowledge brokers. In the Chinese context, where universities are entangled in both state mandates and local development agendas, academic actors become translators, gatekeepers, and negotiators—constantly recalibrating their positionality amid conflicting expectations from the government, community, and capital. This study contributes to the emerging scholarship on relational institutionalism by theorizing governance as an affectively charged, culturally embedded process. It calls for greater attention to the symbolic infrastructure and emotional labor that sustain institutional resilience in rural tourism contexts, particularly in the Global South. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of autoethnography in unpacking the affective and ethical complexities of university–community collaborations. By recentring governance on the terrain of lived experience, this study offers new insights into how rural communities articulate, defend, and transform institutional boundaries under conditions of developmental pressure and cultural uncertainty.