Abstract
Governance offers valuable guidelines to steer and direct destinations. Recent tourism governance research has explored the role of multiple actors in governing destinations but has not comprehensively investigated the underlying collaborative governance (CG) processes such as face-to-face dialogue, trust-building, shared understanding, or supporting factors such as institutional setting or leadership. The objectives of this paper are to determine the drivers and barriers of CG in a community-oriented destination in South Tyrol (Italy). This aims to reveal the processes that drive collaboration between stakeholders. For this reason, the paper builds on a qualitative case study with 20 semi-structured interviews with key informants. The results highlight that destination leadership is an essential driver of CG. However, several barriers to CG emerged. First, the findings show that institutional transformation led to a lack of trust and increased insecurity. Second, the inclusion of salient actors such as residents in the decision-making and implementation phase is scarce. Third, our findings highlight that a shared understanding of future development directions is missing between stakeholders. The contribution of this paper is a refined assessment of CG in tourism with special attention to the role of leadership and institutional settings. The derived implications target the role of leadership to foster the development of a shared understanding and to embark on a collaborative learning process that provides visible and tangible outcomes in turbulent times.
Highlights
The governance of destinations, which are strongly shaped by touristic activities, is becoming an increasingly important topic [1,2,3]
It was shown that networks significantly contribute to tourism governance [11,12,13] and that collaboration and cooperation represent an essential aspect of tourism destinations [14]
This lack of leadership is partly due to the institutional change that occurred in South Tyrol (Italy) in the last years
Summary
The governance of destinations, which are strongly shaped by touristic activities, is becoming an increasingly important topic [1,2,3]. Research has investigated the principles of tourism governance under varying settings [4,5]: At an institutional level, research has concentrated on the role of governance for economic performance [6,7], but recently social and environmental aspects of governance have received increased attention [8,9]. Collaborative processes in tourism have been investigated without paying attention to underlying and supporting factors [17,18]. The aim is to determine the factors that affect CG in the tourism context For this reason, we use the framework by Ansell and Gash [19], which incorporates collaborative processes such as trust-building, commitment to processes, and supporting factors such as leadership and institutional design
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