Controversial Ecotourism and Stakeholder Roles in Governance 113
welfare or long-term sustainability. These sentiments were echoed by the representatives of the local NGOs (IFAW and VTA) and industry members who were attempting to coordinate an annual ‘whale awareness’ week for the local community. This situation was reinforced indisputably when the community interview participants involved in the local tourist accommodation sector asked the researcher: ‘why do tourists come to see the whales?’. It is one of these local participants who, since the running of this study, has applied successfully for his own whale swim operation permit.
Implications for Governance and Sustainable Tourism
114 K. Walker and G. Moscardo
equity and social self-determination with examples demonstrating: enhanced opportunity for local ownership and management of industry operations and associated businesses; leading local representation in industry organizations; local employment and professional development opportunities for males and females;
and facilitation of sociocultural aims and options to remain in the community and support extended family responsibilities.
The challenge that exists in this case is to stimulate the consistent conduct of best practice throughout the industry in Vava’u, and potentially in other compa-rable destinations that may lack international tourism experience, awareness or management processes. In these cases, the community has to be self-motivated regarding appropriate conduct, with their only measure for judgement being their fellow industry members. Vava’u tourism industry representatives and mentored guides suggested having an internationally comparative standard of guiding in the industry or a certifi cation approach. However, a certifi cation scheme alone does not ensure compliance. This study found there was greater motivation to appreciate and adhere to best practice when expatriate owner/operators were present on the vessels and either took on, or provided, a mentoring role to local employees. In many of these cases, the local employees expressed a greater awareness and perceived importance of their role and linkage to personally sig-nifi cant values. These results support the values-based sustainable tourism frame-work, and in particular support the use of training programmes that include an independent coaching process utilizing the personal insight interpretive approach (Walker, 2008b; Walker and Blackman, 2009). The PIIA facilitates the identifi ca-tion of linkages between the interpretive experience involved in an ecotourism activity and the participants’ perceived benefi ts and personally signifi cant values.
This approach aligns with a coaching process, as opposed to a training pro-gramme where ‘training’ is defi ned as being task or job specifi c and focuses on the ‘techniques’ of managing tourists and the provision of relevant educational information associated with the activity (Black and King, 2002), whereas coach-ing is about creatcoach-ing sustained shifts in behaviour, feelcoach-ings and thinkcoach-ing (Grant, 2005). Coaching achieves this by providing a coach who helps the employee link their own personally signifi cant goals and values with their employment role, learning skills of self-assessment and self-development that become a continuous process of application throughout their career. The coach is generally not their employer, who predominantly may have the interests of their business at heart, but instead an independent, experienced person in the fi eld who holds the inter-ests of the employee as paramount and who the employee accesses at junctures in their job training and/or career development, or on a employee need basis (see Walker and Blackman, 2009, for further detail). To be most effective though, it is suggested this approach exists in an operational agenda that is internationally accredited and applied, and thus recognized as best practice.
Previous examination of this approach by Walker (2008a) in association with achieving the sustainable goals of contemporary ecotourism, identifi ed classifi ca-tions within the Green Globe 21 accreditation programme as an appropriate place for incorporation of this approach to ensure community value recognition, identifi cation and interpretive provision (which was seen as an existing weakness in this accreditation programme). Green Globe 21 has the exclusive licence for
Controversial Ecotourism and Stakeholder Roles in Governance 115
the distribution and management of the International Ecotourism Standard and is considered the global affi liation, benchmarking and certifi cation programme for sustainable travel and tourism (Green Globe, 2006; Tourism Australia, 2007).
The recommendations above represent an avenue for locations such as Vava’u to infl uence destination governance. That is, destinations which are striv-ing to develop an ecotourism industry but which may experience the potentially complicated processes and inconsistent relationships of multifaceted international attention and agencies that aim to infl uence tourism conduct and governance.
Instead, the community, its representative agencies and industry stakeholders can infl uence these external processes effectively by initially adopting and implement-ing an international standard of best practice which encourages consistent indus-try performance and sustainable tourism objectives. The standard will achieve this only via the recognition and incorporation of local community values and goals. These in turn can be facilitated through local employment and appropriate training and coaching, the integration of which has been presented in the values-based sustainable tourism framework (Fig. 9.1). This offers the destination stake-holders a framework and tools to lead the pursuit of industry best practice effectively, identifying and recommending locally orientated performance criteria and benchmarks in the best interests of all to achieve. In this way, the local stake-holders have some infl uence on the destination governance outcomes rather than being dictated to completely by potentially confl icting and inconsistent politically driven external agencies.
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Introduction
This case study will demonstrate a shift in the normal paradigm of how government, society and the private sector work together, resulting in a village being able to keep its culture while allowing sustainable tourism to develop. The success of this model can be replicated and implemented in other tourism locations to produce additional signifi cant positive results.
According to J.F. Rischard, the World Bank’s Vice President for Europe, the 21st century is posing unprecedented challenges to our society, driven by an intensively different new world economy and rapid demographic expansion on an ‘already overstretched planet’ (Rischard, 2002). The new challenges faced in this new world order cannot be solved using the ideas, beliefs, norms and underlying assumptions created in the old paradigm. A dangerous ‘governance gap’ is being created between global issues and the capacity of traditional institu-tions to solve them (Rischard, 2001). New models for problem solving, new hierarchical models and new organizational structures need to emerge.
Now, as the new economy and booming demographics add new levels of complexity to contemporary societies, the usual distinctive separate sectors of society – public, business and civil – need to join efforts to guide communities towards a more sustainable future. According to Rischard:
An important new reality emerges: it will take partnerships among government, business, and civil society to solve intractable problems. Odd as they may feel at fi rst – they require an entirely different attitude from what we are used to – expect such tri-sector partnerships to bloom in the next twenty years at every level: global, regional, local.
(Rischard, 2002:51) Tourism, one of the fastest growing industries in the world, is affected consider-ably by the changes proposed by Rischard. The World Tourism Organization fore-casts more than a 100% increase in the total number of international travellers in