Trade‐Offs in the Development of Rural Areas With Abundant Natural Heritage: Assessing the Impact of Sustainability Policies on Agritourism in Poland

ABSTRACT Agritourism is regarded as one of the key pathways to the sustainable development of rural areas, as it simultaneously supports the preservation of natural resources (environmental sustainability) and rural cultural heritage (social sustainability), whilst also contributing to increased farm incomes (economic sustainability). Recent research on agritourism development has largely focused on highly developed countries, characterised by dense settlement networks and well‐developed infrastructure. In such highly anthropogenic settings with limited natural heritage, studies typically demonstrate that agritourism is primarily rooted in rural culture and in the overall economic development of the countryside and supporting policies tend to be shaped within this context. We argue that applying an analogous model to less developed countries, where rural areas are rich in unique environmental assets, may be associated with developmental trade‐offs. Therefore, the aim of this article is to identify the trade‐offs or synergies, among the drivers of agritourism development with particular emphasis on sustainability‐oriented policies in Poland—a country where more than half of the population lives in rural areas characterised by sparse settlement patterns and abundant natural habitats. The trade‐offs were assessed by introducing into the model a set of interactions between policies and environmental assets, as well as spatial interactions between policies. A spatial robust Poisson model was estimated using a 10‐year county‐level panel (2014–2023, 3140 observations). The results show that natural heritage remains the predominant driver of agritourism development in Poland, while some policies are associated with weaker agritourism expansion in areas with high environmental resource endowment.