The aim of the study reported in this chapter was to explore the relationships between destination community awareness and understanding of tourism, com-munity participation in tourism decision making and barriers to effective tourism development in peripheral regions. In this chapter, peripheral regions are defi ned as those that are geographically remote or diffi cult to access from established tourist centres or urban populations, that are removed from decision-making institutions and that have low levels of economic vitality (Botterill et al., 2002).
These include regions in both developing and developed nations and typically these peripheral regions are rural areas. This focus on peripheral regions is important because it is in these regions that tourism is often used as a tool for regional development (Moscardo, 2005a) and where there is often poor gover-nance in relation to tourism decision making (Tosun, 2005). Tosun (2005) provides an example of these issues in several regions in Turkey and Akama (1996) discusses them in the context of tourism in Kenya.
The results presented in this chapter were generated from a database of more than 300 case studies describing tourism development processes and out-comes in peripheral and rural regions. The main focus of this analysis was on identifying the factors associated with negative and positive outcomes and impacts associated with tourism in these regions. The overall approach taken in developing the database was an inductive one based on the general guidelines for developing grounded theory set out by Glaser and Strauss (1967), and updated by Douglas (2003), and the more specifi c framework provided by Eisenhardt (1989) for use with case study research. The present study uses Eisenhardt’s (1989) framework to guide the conduct of the research because of its detail and its continued use by others (Voss et al., 2002; Patton and Appelbaum, 2003; Riege, 2003).
70 G. Moscardo
Table 6.1 summarizes each of the stages and procedures described by Eisen-hardt (1989) and their application to the present study. In summary, the method involved fi nding the cases through literature reviews and searches of the Internet, reading the descriptions provided and content analysing these descriptions to identify factors associated with positive and negative outcomes of tourism devel-opment. This method was tested on a preliminary sample of 40 case studies and full details are available in a paper presenting the results of this test (Moscardo, 2005a). This fi rst test identifi ed the following 12 barriers to effective tourism development:
● dominance of external agents in the development process;
● limited or no formal planning;
● limited market analysis or a reliance on external agents for limited market information;
Table 6.1. Summary of process of analysing case studies to build theory.
Step Main activity The present study
Getting started Defi ne research question Identify barriers to tourism development in peripheral regions
Identify effective processes for such development
Identify useful a priori constructs Themes from previous studies on this topic are identifi ed Selecting cases Specify population Case studies of tourism
development in peripheral regions (a total of 289 have been identifi ed)
Theoretical sampling Select a random sample of 100 cases available in the database
Crafting protocols Multiple data collection methods Combine qualitative and
quantitative methods Multiple investigators
The use of existing cases meets all these criteria
Analysing data Within-case analysis Already provided in existing cases
Cross-case patterns identifi ed Coding for themes and contrasts between pairs of cases used to identify main themes Shaping hypotheses Iterative tabulation of evidence for
each concept across cases
As themes emerge, the list is used to examine new cases and to re-examine earlier cases
Used to develop a preliminary conceptual scheme
The Role of Knowledge in Good Governance for Tourism 71
● limited community awareness of potential negative impacts;
● false expectations about potential benefi ts from tourism;
● confl ict over tourism development within communities;
● lack of tourism leadership from within the community;
● lack of coordination of community stakeholders;
● limited control over, and involvement or participation in, tourism planning by community members;
● limited connections to tourism distribution systems;
● poor infrastructure development; and
● lack of skills and capital within destination communities.
For the present chapter, a random sample of 100 cases was selected. The content analysis of these cases focused specifi cally on the occurrence of the 12 barriers identifi ed in the test stage of the research, any additional barriers, the relation-ships between these barriers and the conditions that contributed to situations where these barriers arose. Table 6.2 provides a basic profi le of the 100 cases analysed. As can be seen, the sample included cases from most regions of the world, although European cases were the most common. The majority of cases described the early stages of tourism development, with only eight cases discuss-ing established tourist destinations. Given the large number of emergdiscuss-ing destina-tions, it is not surprising that few specifi c forms of tourism were discussed.
The fi rst step in the analysis was to examine the 100 cases for discussion of barriers to effective tourism development outcomes for the destination commu-nity. This content analysis was guided by the 12 barriers identifi ed previously,
Table 6.2. Overview of the cases analysed.
Profi le variable Cases (%)
Region Africa Europe Asia Australia South Pacifi c North America Central/South America
12 44 8 18 7 7 4 Type of tourism
Ecotourism
Wildlife-based tourism Rural/farm tourism Cultural tourism
Community-based tourism Resort
Not specifi ed
8 1 24 5 1 1 60 Stage of development
Developing/emerging Developed/established
92 8
72 G. Moscardo
but also sought to identify any further barriers. The results of this step are presented in Table 6.3. Two coders worked independently on the content analy-sis, with an intercoder reliability of 0.67, following the practice advocated by Bryman and Bell (2003). No new barriers were identifi ed by either coder. As can be seen in the table, the three most commonly reported barriers were problems with market analysis or a reliance on external agents for market information, limited control over or involvement by community members in the tourism planning process and a lack of coordination of community stakeholders.
The second step in the analysis looked at the co-occurrence of these barriers and used a hierarchical cluster analysis program to identify how these different barriers were related to each other. Figure 6.1 provides a conceptual framework for understanding the underlying connections between these barriers based on the results of the cluster analysis. The fi rst group of barriers that are commonly combined are limited local leadership, lack of coordination of community stake-holders and the dominance of external agents. Case studies that described these barriers typically reported that where there was no tourism leadership from within the community and/or poor coordination between community stakehold-ers, then external agents tended to dominate tourism governance processes.
These external agents included international tour operators, non-government agencies, consultants and national government departments.
The second group combines limited resident awareness of tourism and its potential negative impacts, limited skills and capital within destination communi-ties and limited market analysis with problems with infrastructure, and false expectations about tourism. This was a commonly occurring cluster of barriers that contributed to poor outcomes in the case studies examined.
The second level of the conceptual framework then links limited planning and confl ict within communities to the false expectations and limited market
Table 6.3. Frequency of occurrence of barriers to effective tourism.
Barriers Cases (%)
Existing barriers:
Limited market analysis or a reliance on external agents for limited market information
Limited control over, and involvement or participation in, tourism planning by community members
Lack of coordination of community stakeholders Poor infrastructure development
Dominance of external agents in the development process Limited or no formal planning
Confl ict over tourism development within communities Limited community awareness of potential negative impacts False expectations about potential benefi ts from tourism Limited connections to tourism distribution systems Lack of tourism leadership from within the community Lack of skills and capital within destination communities
36 26 25 19 18 15 4 13 5 5 4 3
The Role of Knowledge in Good Governance for Tourism 73
analysis, skills and capital cluster. Together, these problems collectively limit local resident involvement in the tourism development process. This in turn means that tourism development is unlikely to be well connected to local businesses; it may mean that the type of tourism developed offers few employment or business opportunities for locals and it typically results in limited attention paid to minimizing the negative impacts of tourism.