THE ECOTOURISM - ELEMENT OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LOCAL RURAL COMMUNITIES FROM BUKOWINA (ROMANIA)

The local rural communities of Romania have been strongly affected by the historian evolution in former decades by social- economic system evolution. To these ones, there have been added a period of almost fifty years of a social system based on centralized economy and, afterwards, Romanian economy was and is marked by the period of transition towards the market economy. All of these periods determined a peculiar social - economic relationship and, in fact, behaviors of the rural inhabitants, as ones between the ones of the temptations or obligations of leaving for the urban settlings. In many cases this lead to the phenomenon of uprooting. The last fifteen years there were villages came back in the centre of many of the politicians', theorists' and practicians' preoccupations. The enlarged Europe also raises problems and question marks in regard to the economic and social development of the local communities in the Romanian rural environment. These uncertainties appear in a period in which we are more and more convinced of the necessity of the sustainable development, of the perpetuation of a responsible economic development, which would ensure the satisfaction of society's needs without endangering future generations. Those presented are accompanied by more and more accentuated tendency of the civilized world of living in good terms with the environment, of spending more time in nature, of being closer to all which is clean, alive and quiet. The number of those that ask for holidays in nature, in the rural environment is growing all over the globe. Soft tourism, in the countryside or in the middle of nature is more and more desired by the rich, but stressed people, eager to return to nature, to the life of the rural communities. All these forms of tourism are called ecotourism, and their development in Romania is only beginning. These activities play an important part in the economic development of rural areas, which will further reflect upon their future evolution. The paper studies the experience gained by The Bukovina (Bucovina) region, a well-known and famous one for its tourism potential and resources, aiming at an interdisciplinary approach of tourism. The issue propose for analyze the rule and the impact of tourism upon the protected areas and on local communities situated in this region, from an economic and social point of view, by means of the inference of the ecotourism strategy, which was adapted by the Ministry of Tourism to the Bukovina Region.