Another issue that has received only passing con- sideration in tourism is the standpoint of the viewer or participant in the tourism planning process. Where do we stand as students of tourism in terms of what we regard as appropri- ate in tourism? How do our work, interests and
values influence such perspectives of tourism?
How do we act on our values in our day-to-day lives through our involvement in tourism plan- ning and tourism policy? There is no absolute standpoint in tourism planning. Our perspectives and actions will shift over time in relation to our changing experiences, knowledge base, values and ideologies, contact with different stakehold- ers, changed legislative and institutional frame- works, and changes in our desired environment, to name just a few factors. Our perspectives and actions will also change according to our posi- tion in the planning process. Are we working for a government agency, a private developer, or as a facility manager? Are we a member of an envi- ronmental interest group trying to preserve a building or save a species, or are we just wanting better facilities in our community, or simply try- ing to stop yet another tower block being built that will block our view or change our streetscape? We may even occupy some of these roles simultaneously. However, these questions are not just academic. How we perceive tourism planning and policy and how we utilise the
Macro Aggregate • Distribution,
patterns, flow
• Activity
• Nation state
• Structure
• Ideology
• National interest
• State interest
• Political culture
• Institutional arrangements
Meso Combines
aggregate and individual analysis
• Mobility, trip stage, lifecourse, travel career
• Organisation
• Decision making
• Individual organisations as policy actors
• Political parties
• Policy networks
Micro Individual • Personality,
psychographics/
lifestyle
• Motivation, expectation, satisfaction
• Individual
• Agency
• Political psychology
• Personality
• Motivations
•Individual political values
•Individual actors
Analyst as planning
and policy
actor
Actor as planning and policy analyst
Planning and policy studies Planning and policy analysis
Knowledge of tourism planning and policy and the planning and policy process
Knowledge in the tourism planning and policy process
Study of planning and policy content
Study of planning and policy process
Study of planning and policy outputs
Evaluation of planning and policy content, process, outputs and outcomes
Information for planning and policy making
Planning and policy process advocacy
Planning output and policy advocacy
Figure 4.4 Types of tourism planning and policy analysis
analysis that is conducted will depend on a par- ticular intersection of factors at any given time, where we sit in the wider tourism planning sys- tem and the type of tourism planning and policy analysis we are conducting (Figure 4.4) (Hogwood and Gunn 1984; Hall and Jenkins 1995; Hall 2005a). Our place in, and ability to influence the planning system is therefore relational.
Such a perspective is not as radical as it seems.
As Healey (1997: 65) observed, ‘it is now widely understood in the planning field that planning is an interactive process, undertaken in a social context, rather than a purely technical process of design, analysis and management’. This is a cru- cial point. Many textbooks relate planning as a technical process in which the writer is out of screen somewhere and the book seems to be writ- ten as a series of facts or statements which sug- gests that this is the way it must be. It isn’t. As Chapter 3 illustrated, there are different tradi- tions of tourism planning, each having its own focus. Each tradition is not inherently wrong or right. We judge it as being wrong or right upon a particular set of criteria that in turn reflect what we believe tourism planning is and should be trying to achieve in terms of outcomes. This shifting base is a reflection of wider perceptions of the tourism ‘expert’ and the ‘planner’ in society.
As Peter Hall (1992: 248) noted, ‘Whatever the planner’s ideology, it appears that people are no longer willing, as once apparently they were, to accept his or her claim to omniscience and omnipotence.’ Such a perspective does not mean that planning is obsolete or redundant as,
almost by definition, . . . planners will never be com- pletely ineffective, or completely omnipotent. They will exist in a state of continuous interaction with the system they are planning, a system which changes partly, but not entirely, owing to processes beyond their mechanisms of control. (P. Hall 1992: 230) We therefore need to recognise that our position in tourism planning is relational to where we lie in the tourism system and the various stakehold- ers, interests and factors with which we interact.
As Hall argued, we are constantly interacting with the people, institutions and environment around us that are themselves in a constant state of change and flux:
Planning in practice, however well managed, is therefore a long way from the tidy sequences of the theorists. It involves the basic difficulty, even impossibility, of predicting future events; the inter- action of decisions made in different policy spheres;
conflicts of values which cannot be fully resolved by rational discussion and by calculation; the clash of
organized pressure groups and the defence of vested interests; and the inevitable confusions that arise from the complex interrelationships between deci- sions at different levels and at different scales, at different points of time. The cybernetic or systems view of planning is a condition towards which planners aim; it will never become complete reality.
(P. Hall 1992: 246)
This relational perspective of planning is in- herent in a systems view of society and of tourism planning, in that we acknowledge that we are part of, rather than separate from, the tourism planning process. When we espouse a particular course of planning action or interpretation of a planning situation we are not merely offering im- partial, objective, technical advice but our advice is value and interest laden and has the power to have substantial social, economic, environmental and political impacts, some of which may be unintended. It is likely that our decisions as well as our perspectives will favour some stakeholders and not others. This applies as much to this au- thor while in the act of writing this book which, as you read it and hopefully reflect on it, may in- fluence your own notion of what tourism plan- ning is, and what it can be, and how you might act, just as it does the person who is laying out the land-use plans for a new resort.
As I write this section at about 1 a.m. on an April morning in a relatively small city in the South Island of New Zealand, I am surrounded by several piles of books, photocopies and field notes (and listening to Nick Cave and KCRW’sRare on Air 3). I am conscious that I am arguing for a par- ticular set of values and positions to be an appro- priate structure for understanding tourism planning and perhaps achieving certain goals re- lating to sustainability that I regard as important. I am making such comments because I wish to en- courage the reader to think about how they per- ceive tourism and how we both understand it and seek to achieve certain goals and objectives through tourism planning. You, me, people, ac- tively construct their worlds. What world do we want to or are we able to construct through tourism? (see Hall 2004c for a further discussion of issues of reflexivity and a rare opportunity to use the word ‘fuck’ in the tourism literature).
Knowledge is related to action. Knowledge and values are actively constituted through social, interactive processes. As Healey (1997: 29) ob- served, public policy and planning are ‘social processes through which ways of thinking, ways of valuing and ways of acting are actively constructed by participants’. Such an approach variously de- scribed as argumentative (Majone 1980a, 1989;
Wildavsky 1987; Fischer and Forester 1993; Hall 1994, 2005a; Hall and Jenkins 1995), commu- nicative (Healey 1992a, b, 1993, 1996; Sager 1994) or interpretative planning theory (Innes 1995; Campbell and Fainstein 2003b) recognises:
• that all forms of knowledge, including policy and planning knowledge, are socially
constructed;
• that the development and communication of knowledge and reasoning takes many legitimate forms;
• the significance of the social context and the interactions within that context which provide for the development of an individual’s interests and knowledge;
• the role of power relations in influencing the social context and interactions of planning both at the level of decision making and non- decision making and at deeper levels of social relations and ideology;
• that public policies and the development of the knowledge and reasoning which determine such policies need to be owned by all the stakeholders who are affected by the policy-making process, particularly when it is spatially organised around place needs and goals;
• that the above observation means that greater emphasis needs be provided on collaborative consensus-building rather than competitive interest bargaining. In several polities this may require the formation of more participatory political cultures than exist at present;
• that therefore planning, as part of the context of social relations within which decision making and policy development occur, has the capacity to improve the context of social relations in order to develop more partici- patory and equitable practices (Healey 1997).
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