Abstract
ABSTRACT Tourism growth, particularly in cities, is coming under increased scrutiny. However, even often visited cities appear to find it difficult to agree upon a strategy to limit tourism growth. The current paper investigates this issue by looking at the extent to which different stakeholders’ perspectives on tourism development align. Q-sort methodology is employed to find the main worldviews and the extent to which they are shared by stakeholders in similar roles (e.g. policymakers, industry, resident). Results point to the existence of five different worldviews, which differ in the extent to which tourism growth is desirable or problematic and whether resident participation is advantageous or counterproductive. Stakeholders have highly different worldviews, even those with similar roles, which may help explain the difficulty to change the tourism growth paradigm as they limit opportunities for generating new consensus-based collective solutions. If we accept that tourism development strategies are driven and informed at least in part by individual worldviews, it may be impossible to make ‘objective’ policy choices. Instead, it might be more useful to explore possibilities to allow stakeholders to express their worldviews to better understand what sustainable tourism development entails for different people at different places and moments in time.
Highlights
In the overtourism debate that has come to dominate discussions on urban tourism in recent years, most research up to now has been dedicated to better appreciating the perceived impacts and underlying causes of these impacts and management strategies to deal with overtourism
This paper reports on a research project dedicated to establishing current personal worldviews of relevant stakeholders of sustainable urban tourism development in five European cities through applying a Q methodology
The extraction is similar to standard factor analysis (‘R’ methodology) in regular quantitative data analysis but, where in R the initial factors are often extracted by means of Principle Component Analysis (PCA), in Q methodology it is more common to use the so-called Centroid procedure (McKeown & Thomas, 2013)
Summary
In the overtourism debate that has come to dominate discussions on urban tourism in recent years, most research up to now has been dedicated to better appreciating the perceived impacts and underlying causes of these impacts (see e.g. Fava & Rubio, 2017; Koens, Postma, & Papp, 2018; Novy, 2018) and management strategies to deal with overtourism (see e.g. Pechlaner, Innerhofer, & Erschbamer, 2019; UNWTO, 2018). One of the main outcomes of these efforts seems to be a wide recognition of the gap between (economic) tourism development on the one hand and the perceived needs and desires of local city users on the other Another issue that is commonly brought up, is the apparent lack of leadership and coordination when it comes to managing and regulating tourism development (Koens, Postma, & Papp, 2019), echoing similar findings in earlier research (Dodds, 2007; Timur & Getz, 2009). The (media) discourse in the context of overtourism can be considered anti-tourism as it strongly denounces tourism development, with little attention to the different causes and levels of perceived overtourism (Clancy, 2019) This rather binary way of framing ignores the different perspectives on appropriate reference points for urban tourism governance that numerous stakeholders ‘on the ground’ hold and (try to) express in discussions on urban tourism planning. To better understand the mechanisms at work here and their implications for ultimate decision-making on the ground, it is necessary to better understand these various perspectives towards tourism development
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