Collaborative Governance in Tourism: Empirical Insights into a Community-Oriented Destination

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.

Creating shared collaborative tourism identity in a post-communist environment

“…In understanding the creation of shared collaborative identity, it is important to consider the changes that have shaped the post-communist tourism environment in Estonia. Bichler and Lösch (2019) highlight the role of institutional support for tourist destinations and the transformation of the institutions responsible for tourism development. Changes in the leadership and decrease in trust levels have a major impact on collaborations.…”

“…The entity of the collaborative platform Previously, in tourism research the discussion on platforms has focused mostly on the concept of innovation platform, which helps stakeholders to innovate and share knowledge through an open discussion (Lalicic, 2018). As communication is extremely important in tourism collaboration, digitally supported platforms can help stakeholders interact (Bichler & Lösch, 2019;Lindström, 2020). The collaborative platform proposed in this study (Figure 2) can have a virtual or physical (e.g.…”

“…The collaborative platform must offer a social networking element to stakeholders, serving as a communication and socialisation tool between stakeholders who work in different tourism fields and sectors, which helps to increase stakeholder's sense of belonging to a collaboration (Figure 2). This is especially needed when it is difficult to find consensus in collaborative decision making (Bichler & Lösch, 2019).…”

What Is Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Sustainable Destination Development?

“…Public-private partnership governance Bichler and Lösch (2019) [91] identified the drivers and barriers to collaborative governance in community-oriented destinations in South Tyrol (Italy). At the destination level, leadership is the main driver of collaborative governance, which supports trust and communication between entrepreneurs and representatives of public institutions.…”

“…[ 91,92] 3.6. Leading Theme 6: Digitalization Digitalization, along with information and communication technology (Hereinafter referred to as ICT) and other smart technologies, is an emerging theme that provides insights for sustainable destination development, which account for 10.86% of sustainable destination development literature.…”