More and more cities around the world are adopting green-city labels and are making use of their urban environmental policymaking for the purpose of place branding. However, the nature of the relationship between the branding of green cities and urban environmental policymaking is contested. Some researchers have highlighted so-called 'greenwashing' and the cherry picking of easily attained goals. Others argue that green branding is driven by altruism and ambitions spread good practice, rather than intra-urban competition and entrepreneurialism. Drawing on literatures on policy tourism and green place branding, this article presents a longitudinal study of green branding in Växjö, Sweden. It contributes to the debate on green place branding by showing how two sets of contradictory impulsesentrepreneurialism/competition versus altruism/cooperation, and cherrypicking/greenwashing versus comprehensive environmental policymaking-affect the relationship between green place branding and environmental policy. In particular, the analysis illuminates the changing role played by policy tourism in shaping both the development of environmental policies and branding practices.
This paper compares two Arctic cruise destinations -Ísafjörður in Iceland, and Qaqortoq in Greenland -focusing on stakeholders' perceptions of the sustainability of cruise tourism, and how they are managing the development of the industry in the context of imbalances in power between place-bound local stakeholders and global cruise lines. Drawing on interviews with local stakeholders, the paper argues that destination development stage and the relative importance of land-based tourism frame the ways in which stakeholders perceive the sustainability of cruise tourism. While there were differences in the emphasis placed on environmental, socio-cultural and economic aspects of sustainability in each destination, there were similarities in the ways in which stakeholders conceptualised relations between the different aspects in terms of trade-offs and competition, together with a lack of a holistic perspective and concern about economic dependence on global cruise lines. The findings suggest that intergovernmental agreements are needed to address regulatory issues and that national coordination may help to improve collaboration between destinations.
There has been growing interest in regional policies that stimulate interactions between different sectors, often based on the concept of 'related variety'. Harmaakorpi (2006) has described the identification and development of new cross-sectoral growth trajectories as building 'regional development platforms'. This article contributes to conceptual debates about cross-sectoral regional development platforms and provides empirical analysis of attempts to create and develop such a platform. From a conceptual perspective we argue that the notion of related variety can help policymakers to identify potential combinatorial platform opportunities, but may overestimate the ability of 'related' actors to collaborate together in innovative ways, because knowledge is embedded in practice and the process of 'combining' knowledge in new activities therefore challenging. The paper illuminates the development of cross-sectoral platforms by examining the creation of new activities from a practice perspective that directs attention to the everyday activities, routines and understandings that constitute the 'doing' of economic development. We explore the development of a cross sectoral platform in the North Jutland region of Denmark, which integrates actors from the food and tourism sectors into a new food-tourism platform. We identify the dominant forms of the practices of producing food, retailing, catering, and promoting tourism, and then consider the ways in which these have changed in response to new cross-sectoral initiatives. The analysis shows that some aspects of practice are easier to change than others, and we conclude that an analytical approach inspired by practice theory can identify the requirements in 4 terms of micro-level change in the practices of actors that is required for an initiative to succeed.
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