Collaboration and Partnerships in Tourism Planning

Bill Bramwell Centre for Tourism, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Bernard Lane Rural Tourism Unit, University of Bristol, UK

Introduction

Tourism, like so many modern industries, is essentially an assembly process. In few situations does one company or organisation control all the components, or all the stages and decision-making processes in the creation and delivery of the tourism product. Vertical integration is not a hallmark of most tourism operations. Equally, horizontal integration is relatively rare: single ownership of all the airlines, hotels or other forms of tourism product is unusual, even in one region.

The diffuse and fragmented nature of tourism development has long been recognised. Ways of overcoming the problems caused by fragmentation have also been long sought. Over the last fifty years, local tourism associations have promoted intra-industry cooperation, and national tourism offices have represented the enterprises of their country to the market (Pearce,1992). Internationally, groupings such as the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) and the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) typify cross-border tourism alliances.

Few or even none of the above is, however, a collaborative arrangement or partnership in the sense discussed in this book. The term partnership is used here to describe regular, cross-sectoral interactions between parties based on at least some agreed rules or norms, intended to address a common issue or to achieve a specific policy goal or goals. All the collaborative arrangements examined in this collection of papers are concerned with issues or policies that go beyond basic tourism questions, and have broader economic, social and environmental dimensions. The cross-sectoral reference is important: partnerships that seek to create sustainable tourism need to be holistic in outlook. A focus on cross-sectoral interactions also rules out the examination here of simplistic marketing groups or trading alliances.

Conceptual Background

The importance of involving diverse stakeholders in tourism planning and management is receiving growing recognition. This has led to increasing attention being directed to the use of collaborative arrangements or partnerships that bring together a range of interests in order to develop and sometimes also implement tourism policies. Collaborative arrangements for tourism planning involve face-to-face interactions between stakeholders who may be in the public, semi-public, private or voluntary sectors, including pressure and interest groups. Stakeholder collaboration has the potential to lead to dialogue, negotiation and the building of mutually acceptable proposals about how tourism should be developed. Partnerships involved in tourism planning usually bring together interests in the same destination but in different sectors, or else parties in different destinations but with mutual interests in one issue or related issues.

A key reason for the growing interest in partnerships in tourism development is the belief that tourist destination areas and organisations may be able to gain competitive advantage by bringing together the knowledge, expertise, capital and other resources of several stakeholders (Kotler et al., 1993). Some commentators also contend that decisions about tourism development should not be left to a few politicians, government officials or tourism entrepreneurs, suggesting that a wide range of stakeholders should have opportunities to participate in decision-making that affects their interests. These commentators claim that the broadly based ownership of tourism policies can bring democratic empowerment and equity, operational advantages, and an enhanced tourism product (Jamal and Getz, 1995; Joppe, 1996; Murphy, 1985; Timothy, 1999).

Partnership approaches to tourism planning are now widely endorsed by government and public agencies in many developed countries. The UK government's tourism policy document, Tomorrow's Tourism, includes a commitment to 'encourage tourism management partnerships between local authorities, tourism operators and local communities' (DCMS, 1999:53). Within the UK context, Charlton and Essex (1996:178) have noted that 'A striking feature of the contemporary tourism landscape is the wealth of collaborative initiatives and partnerships'. Across the Atlantic, Selin and Chavez (1995: 844-5) suggest that 'While tourism organizations have always been involved in partnerships to a certain degree, recent economic, political, and social forces in the United States and elsewhere, have combined to make partnerships an explicit priority of these agencies'. Beyond the English-speaking world, the concept of the partnership approach is also beginning to make headway. Spain's new tourism policy document, Spain: A Sustainable Tourism, speaks of 'the incorporation of long-term considerations and the integration of the environmental factor, along with the participation of all parties...