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This chapter explores various theoretical and practical issues of sustainable tourism approaches in industrial areas. This includes applying sustainability approaches and ideas to the growing domain of industrial tourism. The essence, main definitions, and provisions of industrial and sustainable tourism are discussed and summarized, focusing on the use of tourist potential in former and current industrial areas. The case study of sustainability-based industrial tourism development was carried out in three tourist destinations in the USA and Germany: Lowell (USA), the Ruhr River basin, and Papenburg (Germany). Examples of best practices and possibilities for implementation in Armenia are also discussed. Particularly, the use of tourist attractions of mining and metallurgical industries and the “revival” of former industrial enterprises for touristic, cultural, cognitive, and entertainment purposes are framed as priority activities.

This paper examines the introduction of neoliberal policies in the mining sector in Armenia and the civil society opposition to those policies and practices. While recognizing that neoliberal policies have global reach, the paper examines how neoliberal policies are locally translated, manifested, and resisted in Armenia and analyzes the factors that shape resistance to neoliberal policies. It argues that the anti-mining activists have created new subjectivities and spaces for activism where they resist and challenge neoliberal policies and practices in the mining sector as well as the heretofore accepted formal practices of civil society advocacy and engagement in policy processes. Although the anti-mining activists have not changed the way mining is practiced in Armenia, they have opened up debates around mining, and neoliberal policies more generally, and created new understandings and practices of civic activism and social mobilization in Armenia.