Tourism development and local resilience: self-organisation and community empowerment perspectives
How can tourism development affect community resilience to natural hazards in different self-organisation and regulatory contexts? How should policy-making address these relationships?
This project explores how tourism development affects local community resilience to natural hazards in destinations presenting different manifestations of local empowerment, state regulation and local self-organisation.
Being highly significant to the Australian economy–representing about 11% of its GDP (WTTC, 2016), tourism requires comprehensive understanding to ensure it is properly addressed in planning processes that target disaster risk reduction and local resilience for community benefit. Findings are expected to advance understanding of the connections between urban and regional development, illustrating pathways for building local community resilience to natural hazards and informing Australian and Victorian policy-making for disaster risk reduction.
A multiple case study approach informed the selection of 2 core sites where alternative self-government arrangements have been exercised and formally recognised for about 40 years – Christiania (Copenhagen, Denmark) and Norfolk Island (Australia), and two reference sites where state regulation and control is exercised in different local governance models – Port Fairy (standard unit of a Victorian Local Council) and Lord Howe Island (state-appointed administrator responding to a state-local mixed board). The four sites are tourist destinations bearing distinctiveness in term of clear boundaries; being subject to different degrees of state regulation; and portraying different manifestations of self-organisation connected to specific levels of local empowerment, local social cohesion, local identity and local attachment to place.
Images Credits and Licenses:
“Tourism and Resilience in a Complex World” by Guilherme Takamisawais licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 and is a derivative of the following works (from left to right):
- “lightning” by texaus1 used under CC BY 2.0 / Cropped from original
- “Sturnus vulgaris / Common starling / Star” by katunchik used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped from original
- “World Airline Routes” by Josullivan.59 used under CC-BY-3.0 / Cropped from original after application of inversion blend mode by exclusion
- “Parliament House, Melbourne, VIC, Australia” by Guilherme Takamisawa used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped from original
