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This paper investigates the relative importance of social and cultural capitals in (re)shaping a tourism resource governance approach for supporting sustainable livelihood outcomes. We apply a ‘Cap...

A broader view of sustainable tourism development is becoming increasingly apparent, in which the discourse of sustainability has been extended to include notions of tourism/community capitals, sus...

This paper interrogates the changing role of local government in tourism development. It does so through the examination of the Hurunui District, a rural district in New Zealand which has experienced significant transformation in the tourism sector and a concomitant increase in public sector input over the past 25 years. By situating this interrogation within an evolving neoliberal public policy context, this paper explores the tensions at play between tourism stakeholders and decision-makers, and it critiques the way in which local government involvement in the sector is manifested as regulation, promotion, and ownership of key tourism resources in the District. The significance of this paper is that it extends our understanding of the role of the state in tourism and of the influence of public policy on tourism development, potentially including sustainable tourism development. Specifically, it draws our attention to the rationality, roles and activities of public sector engagement in the touris...

This article is part of research exploring various ways to visualize the complexity of sentient movement in space and time. In this case, visualization focuses on the movement of tourists on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, with some commentary on national tourist activity. Working at the atomistic level of the individual we adopt space, time, and activity (s,t,a) as the three main dimensions of sentient movement, but we emphasize activity as a privileged dimension where visualization is involved. The rationale for this is that when interpreting movements of individuals or crowds, most itineraries either reflect resources in the environment that encourage travel or avoid risk or cause delay, resources ranging from food and water to incoming sunshine or rain. Activity and process is at the heart of most rich movement data-sets, and we suggest that using multiple-view visualization to decode (s,t,a) and environmental patterns opens further avenues for interpreting and communicating dynamic...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified Australia as among the developed nations most at risk from climate change effects. Key tourism icon destinations and the tourism sector generally have been identified as being particularly at risk. This paper reports on an interdisciplinary, multi-case study approach to assess tourism stakeholders' knowledge of, and approaches to, climate change adaptation and to explore the potential for building a self-assessment toolkit that can be exported to other tourism destinations. This study examined existing knowledge on anticipated biophysical changes and, through primary research (stakeholder interviews and social learning workshops), gauged the expected adaptive approaches of destination communities and the tourism sector to these changes for 2020, 2050 and 2070. The facilitated workshops generated a common set of adaptation strategies across a diverse set of tourist destinations. A key finding from the workshops is that the tourism sector is not yet ready to invest in climate change adaptation because of the perceived uncertainties. Ongoing leadership for such measures were seen to rest with the public sector, especially local authorities. Whether such assessments can be self-generated or require specialist facilitation remains open to debate.

Through decentralization, local governments play an increasingly important role in tourism development. While there has been much research on local government's role in achieving sustainable tourism, relatively little research has been conducted on the capacity of local government to achieve sustainable tourism. This is particularly the case for developing countries such as Thailand. Applying the Nominal Group Technique and using in‐depth interviews with key stakeholders, this paper seeks to examine the capacity of a local Thai government administration, namely, the Tambon Administrative Authority (TAA). This research also examines the local government's influences on and responses to sustainable tourism development. The research findings demonstrate the TAA has adequate capacity in terms of legislative authority mandate, but limited capacity in terms of its resources including insufficient knowledge of tourism issues, budget and staffing. The paper concludes these limitations have resulted in a ...

The research reported here documents the awareness of ecolabels among visitors to Christchurch, one important visitor destination in New Zealand. Around the world there is a growing debate about ecolabels and how visitors respond to them. We propose to inform this debate by studying the relationship between visitor response to ecolabels and their environment values. In interviews with 295 visitors to Christchurch it was found that only one-fifth recalled any place with ecolabels, and only 13% had ever heard of any tourism ecolabel. However, 33% of visitors had some experience of ecolabels. Data were cluster analysed to find that 61% of respondents expressed biocentric values and 39% expressed ambivalent values but not anthropocentric values towards nature. Further analysis of the data showed that the clusters had different responses on many dimensions of ecolabels. Biocentric visitors were concerned with the environment in which they travel, believed that ecolabels are needed in New Zealand, and said they...