Paradigms in regional policy have changed in the past few years. Regional policies no longer focus upon rural regions but instead concentrate on areas where growth is likely, and therefore on agglomerations. This policy shift implies that the structurally rather weak, rural peripheral regions have to become responsible for autonomously valorizing their potentials. Often named potentials are an attractive landscape or an intact nature, which serve as basis for a tourism development. However, in view of the large and global pressure of competition, and given the increasing expectations of tourists for quality of tourism services, suitability of tourism as a motor of regional development must be queried. One of the reasons that tourism may not be the ideal motor is that rural small tourism firms are known to be particularly challenged by structural weaknesses. Taking the trekking tourism project “Grande Traversata delle Alpi” (GTA) in the Piedmont Alps (Northern Italy) as an example, I studied the prospects of regional development by tourism in a peripheral laggard region. For the sake of generating inputs to regional development, a tourism project has to be competitive. So, the present study assesses GTA’s competitive situation by analyzing all of the factors influencing competitiveness on the micro and meso level, and examines the actions related to these competitive factors. This analysis focused on the logics and strategies of actions of all (potentially) involved actors in order to explain the reasons for the state of competitiveness. This heuristic presents a conceptual contribution to regional development analysis on the basis of Mayntz’ and Scharpf’s actor centered institutionalism. [...]