Place Branding as Participatory Governance? An Interdisciplinary Case Study of Tasmania, Australia

Abstract

Research in both public administration and place development has identified a need to develop more participatory approaches to governing cities and regions. Scholars have identified place branding as one of several potential policy instruments to enable more participatory place development. Recently, academics working in diverse disciplines, including political studies, public administration, and regional development have suggested that an alternative, bottom-up, more participatory approach to place branding could be employed. Such an interdisciplinary approach would use iterative communication exchanges within a network of diverse stakeholders including residents to better foster stakeholder participation, contribute to sustainable development, and deliver substantive social justice and increased citizen satisfaction. Building on this research and using an exploratory, qualitative, case-study methodology, our aim was to observe and analyze such interactions and communicative exchanges in practice. Drawing on the experience of the Australian state of Tasmania, we studied stakeholder reactions to the participatory place branding approach. We found that although participants were initially skeptical and identified many barriers to implementing participatory place branding, they simultaneously became excited by its possibilities and able to identify how many of the barriers could be transcended.

COVID-19 and the participatory place branding impasse: a study of actor agency

“…Despite widespread academic and increasingly practitioner interest in engagement, the extent to which these routes offer meaningful versus tokenistic engagement remains in dispute (Ripoll González and Gale, 2020). Criticisms include a tendency to opt for a standardised approach, which fails to capture the diversity of the groups involved (Hakala, 2021).…”

“…Agency can, for example, be subtly obtained and actioned by local representatives when working collaboratively to shape and share visual narratives of a place (Rebelo et al , 2020). Yet, other studies recognise that participation is not always equally attained and identify tensions that can surface (Ripoll González and Gale, 2020; Green et al , 2016; Kavaratzis and Hatch, 2013). Studies have also begun to map a hierarchy of involvement by categorising actors based on their varying ability to participate (Hakala, 2021; Henninger et al , 2016).…”

“…Attention is therefore granted to the discursive engagement tools that give voice to multiple actors’ meaning-making processes (Hanna and Rowley, 2011). Often place branding is a decentralised, holistic and negotiated process with parallels to a form of soft governance (Eshuis and Edwards, 2013; Ripoll González and Gale, 2020).…”

“…While these developments bring to the fore calls for inclusivity, the extent to which greater inclusion occurs in practice remains disputed (Ripoll González and Gale, 2020). This gulf in theory and practice signals a participatory place branding impasse, where uneven and tokenistic involvement remains commonplace (Hakala, 2021; Henninger et al , 2016).…”

Place branding in the eyes of the place stakeholders – paradoxes in the perceptions of the meaning and scope of place branding

“…Typically, participation is oriented to increasing input for decisions, and in striving to enrich the input received, it becomes important to make the process broadly accessible to and representative of the general public (Quick and Feldman, 2011). One path towards participatory place branding can been to engage the wider community of stakeholders in a systematic reflection of current and possible alternative practices (Ripoll González and Gale, 2020), where Hakala (2021) emphasizes the importance of effective and genuine “listening”. Interest in involving stakeholders is of course not limited to place branding processes, but rather is an issue for the entire public sector where, for example, public participation in urban planning and management goes back as far as the 1970s (Li et al , 2020).…”