Sustainability of the tourist supply chain and governance in an insular biosphere reserve destination: the perspective of tourist accommodation

ABSTRACT

Small islands in peripheral regions are currently perceived as attractive tourist destinations. Governance plays an important role as a strategy for the revival of such destinations to achieve a more productive, environmental, social and sustainable management structure. ‘Good’ governance of a destination depends on all the actors involved in the tourism network. Such governance requires a redefinition of relations between government and society and minimal boundaries between public and private sectors. This paper has analysed the level of implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a tourist destination that is a biosphere reserve (BR), the island of Fuerteventura (Canary Islands, Spain), from a comprehensive approach involving a tourism supply chain (TSC) with private and public agents. The focal firms analysed within the TSC have been tourist accommodation establishments in Fuerteventura. The paper shows that the level of involvement of tourist accommodation in CSR is positive. However, this involvement is not sufficiently high to meet the requirements of a destination designated as a BR. Therefore, coordination policies should be developed that promote governance systems and further enhance sustainability in the destination.     

Rural drinking water governance politics in China: Governmentality schemes and negotiations from below

This paper examines the politics of rural water governance in China through a governmentality lens and village water intervention case. The China Rural Drinking Water Safety Project (RDWSP) was an attempt to control water, while also serving as a tool of power to impel the rural population towards national development goals. The authors analyzed official documents and conducted interviews in a village in Shandong Province to investigate the RDWSP's rationale and practices, as well as how water access and management were negotiated by rural water users. The paper argues that (1) confronted with a decline in local governance capacity and in an effort to rectify the mistakes of the supply-driven, technocratic paradigm, the RDWSP attempted to integrate social, environmental and economic concerns but did not achieve that goal; (2) the decline in local governance capacity and people's pragmatic everyday strategies contributed to an individualized approach to solving water problems, reflected in people's disengagement from the government project and local participation, an effect that may sustain people's marginalization and exclusion from good-quality water access and management. Using the Chinese water project as an example, the paper contributes to the debate on state-induced water control versus civil society “counter-conduct” formed by daily interactions. Furthermore, it enriches the study of politics in general by presenting the state as a site of contested institutionalization and ongoing negotiations, confronted by everyday narratives and encounters with marginalized citizens that go far beyond and are far more complex than overt resistance or covert weapons of the weak.     

Rescaling regions in the state: The New Regionalism in California

A “new civic regionalism” – based on participatory, inclusive and partnership models of governance – has recently been rolled out in California to tackle the challenges of urban growth, planning and economic development across the State's diverse metropolitan and rural regions. Backed by non-profits and private foundations, California's New Regionalism has been packaged as a flexible and responsive grassroots governance initiative, which is designed to circumnavigate State and local government. Its proponents have been influenced by New Regionalist ideas and practices circulating nationally and internationally. Despite this, our explanation for the rise of the New Regionalism in California is not grounded in these wider theoretical and policy developments; nor do we see it as the outcome of a “new politics of scale” framed around the region. Instead, California's newest regionalism is part of a much longer-standing social movement spearheaded by large-scale business interests and directed at reorganizing local and State government powers particularly in urban regions. This regional reform movement has sought to rationalize land use and environmental planning, coordinate infrastructure, and make government more fiscally efficient and responsive to growth. Over the longer term, its efforts have been undermined by the fiscal fallout of the property tax revolt, Proposition 13. Our analysis calls into question some of the claims in the literature on state rescaling and suggests the value of collapsing the conceptual distinction made between new spaces of political regionalism and regional economic spaces.     

Sir Otto Niemeyer,the bankrupt state and the federal system

One of the main myths about Australian political and economic history relates to the intervention in economic policy making in the 1930s by the Bank of England through the mission of Sir Otto Niemeyer. This article argues that Niemeyer's advice was not heeded. Rather, parallels between what he demanded and the Premiers’ Plan were largely confined to the level of rhetoric as part of a strategy to regain access to the London capital market. State expenditures were reduced gradually according to local political calculations and fiscal priorities, and not in step with the timetable set by the Bank of England. Far from weakening and dividing the Australian state, the federal separation of powers led to the gradual introduction of fiscal austerity, as state governments had little option but to maintain their role in complementing capital accumulation and facilitating social legitimation.     

Not Learning from the Past: Adaptive Governance Challenges for Australian Natural Resource Management

Australia's governance arrangements for natural resource management (NRM) have evolved considerably over the last 30 years. The impact of changes in governance on NRM planning and delivery requires assessment. We undertake a multi‐method programme evaluation using adaptive governance principles as an analytical frame and apply this to Queensland to assess the impacts of governance change on NRM planning and governance outcomes. Data to inform our analysis includes: (1) a systematic review of 16 audits/evaluations of Australian NRM over a 15‐year period; (2) a review of Queensland's first‐generation NRM plans; and (3) outputs from a Queensland workshop on NRM planning. NRM has progressed from a bottom‐up grassroots movement into a collaborative regional NRM model that has been centralised by the Australian government. We found that while some adaptive governance challenges have been addressed, others remained unresolved. Results show that collaboration and elements of multi‐level governance under the regional model were positive moves, but also that NRM arrangements contained structural deficiencies across multiple governance levels in relation to public involvement in decision‐making and knowledge production for problem responsiveness. These problems for adaptive governance have been exacerbated since 2008. We conclude that the adaptive governance framework for NRM needs urgent attention so that important environmental management problems can be addressed.     

Evaluating social sustainability in historic urban environments

Government policies aimed at the alleviation of poverty and social exclusion have been moving toward a multi-faceted approach that includes community capacity building and collaborative partnerships. This implies greater community consultation and the involvement of public and private institutions and the voluntary sector in the democratic management of local affairs. While these are established theoretical concepts, implementing localised social policy and measuring the outcomes are notoriously difficult, particularly in historic urban areas where democratic decision making has the potential to conflict with the management of heritage value. Drawing on recent policy and academic literature, this paper explores the concept of social sustainability and the characteristics of its evaluation. The paper illustrates how social sustainability indicators favour multi-dimensional themes that support national political agendas. The tension between this and the rise of participatory governance is highlighted. The paper concludes with a suggested approach to the evaluation of social sustainability in historic urban environments.     

Understanding Local Leadership in Building the Capacity of Rural Communities in Australia

Current approaches to rural community development in Australia provide for limited government intervention. Such intervention is usually housed within programmes that seek to build the internal capacity of communities to achieve long term socio‐economic sustainability. A fundamental implementation strategy for capacity building has been developing local leadership. The underlying assumption of this approach is that good leadership will result in existing resources being mobilised for a more sustainable function and new resources attracted. What though is good leadership in terms of building the capacity of rural communities to develop sustainable socio‐economic futures? This paper compares the conceptualisation of leadership within rural development policies and leadership training programmes with the nature of local leadership as it exists in on‐ground community building projects. From an in‐depth review of the role and nature of local leadership within six Australian rural communities it was found that local leadership could result in improved adaptive capacity if the leadership is similar in nature to Burn's (1978 ) transformational model of leadership. Within policy, local leadership was most often conceptualised as being similar to this transformational model. However, rural leadership training programmes tended to conceptualise leadership as a top‐down process, similar to Burn's (1978 ) transactional model. While this study of leadership within rural communities revealed that transactional skills, as taught in leadership training programmes, were important for successful project management, such skills did not necessarily result in improved community adaptive capacity. It is suggested that, while transactional leadership can have an important role in influencing the development of rural communities, greater attention needs to be given to developing strategies to support transformational leadership.     

Policy governance from an autopoietic perspective: revisiting Hungary’s regionalization experience

This perspective on Hungary’s post-socialist regional policy governance is informed by an approach that relates region-building and regional governance to social autopoiesis and the self-referential and self-(re)producing nature of social systems such as states. Following debates in regional studies that reflect tensions between the local constitution and external determination of regional governance, we will demonstrate how Hungary has incorporated European Union (EU) policy frameworks through specific appropriations of territorial politics and regional ideas. These appropriations reflect Hungary’s post-socialist transformation not only in terms of responses to global forces, but also as specific spatial practices and regionalization experiences. As we argue, this has in effect resulted in a regionalism without regions – a strategy of Europeanizing territorial politics without creating institutional structures that directly challenge existing power relations. Autopoiesis thus helps explain the resilience of social systems, not only their resistance to institutional change but also their capability to ‘domesticate’ external influences. While criticisms of Hungary’s technocratic and post-political regionalization projects cannot be ignored, our analysis indicates why externally driven intervention in self-organizing governance processes, for example through EU conditionality, has had less impact than expected.     

Auf gute Nachbarschaft!

Companies' community involvement turns out to be spatially relevant and–in many cases–to be focused on the near surroundings of the place of business. Some companies strategically align their involvement in order to systematically address local challenges. The essay at hand addresses the subject of corporate social responsibility from a local development perspective. Using the example of two family-owned enterprises based in Duisburg, Haniel and Grillo, it illustrates how socially committed companies can get involved with their local community by acting as good neighbours. Furthermore, it argues that socially committed companies can function as producers of space concerning matters of urban and local development. The specific local settings as well as the economic conditions of the local community serve as an explanatory background of the companies' involvement. The cases presented in this paper prove the firms' specific knowledge of local development needs and possibilities. This makes them qualified partners for local government actors and civil society actors. Thus, in the future, it is worth addressing corporate local responsibility from a governance point of view both in theory and in practice.     

Hungry for Justice: Social Mobilization on the Right to Food in India

This article explores the potential and limits of contemporary economic rights‐based social activism by analysing an ongoing ‘Right to Food Campaign’ in India. While social movement theory often positions radical and reform strategies as alternatives, the RTF campaign has adopted a hybrid strategy: it has made a radical legal demand that the right to food be recognized as intrinsic to the right to life, while seeking implementation of this right through reform of existing government feeding programmes. The campaign's dual strategy reflects two distinct logics of human rights: a logic of non‐derogable rights that are immediately actionable (such as the right to life) and a logic of progressive implementation of rights that can only be realized fully over time (such as economic rights). This article draws on original data to demonstrate that the campaign's radical legal demands framed around the non‐derogable right to life have come closer to fulfilment than its reformist demands around progressive implementation. The RTF campaign's relative success in galvanizing legal action on hunger is tempered by ongoing challenges in sustaining grassroots‐level mobilization and influencing public policy implementation.     

Postcolonial cultural governance: a study of heritage management in post-1997 Hong Kong

This paper seeks to unpack the politics of heritage preservation in post-1997 Hong Kong. Referring to international frameworks on heritage preservation, it seeks to position Hong Kong’s cultural resource management on par with international discourses for the advancement of heritage governance. Debates surrounding heritage are indeed a part of the wider picture of Hong Kong’s cultural and identity politics and the Hong Kong-China relationship. By examining various contested cases of heritage conservation, and by linking those debates back to the government’s responses within the context of cultural governance, we suggest that heritage management has become a hot stove for cultural politics in post-colonial Hong Kong with deep repercussions in the political, social and economic spheres. The paper examines the rising social debates concerning the removal and conservation of built heritage, and the various government attempts to address these debates. It argues that the current heritage governance mechanism has failed to meet social needs and provide an articulated heritage policy. We propose that a coherent organisational structure is required to better accommodate diverse and contradictory views and discourses surrounding heritage and cultural governance and to tackle the various cultural challenges in postcolonial Hong Kong.     

The “Corona Warriors”? Community health workers in the governance of India's COVID-19 response

India's nearly 1-million strong band of quasi-volunteer accredited social health activists (ASHAs) have been key actors in government efforts to control COVID-19. Utilizing a nationalist rhetoric of war, ASHAs were swiftly mobilized by the government in March 2020 as ‘COVID warriors’ engaged in tracking illness, disseminating information, and caring for quarantined individuals. The speed at which ASHAs were mobilized into mentally and physically grueling labor was all the more stunning given these minimally paid community health workers have long been seen to have low morale given their precarious, informalized work arrangements. Building on work examining the spatialities of global health governance alongside literature on geographic contingency, this paper explores the ways that nationalist COVID-19 war rhetoric promulgated from Delhi worked as a technology of health governance to propel ASHAs into certain forms of action, yet also opened up spaces of potentiality for them to reimagine their relationship to both the state and the communities they serve. In particular, in our analysis of in-depth telephone interviews with ASHA workers in the state of Himachal Pradesh, we find that their hailing as COVID warriors inspired patriotic calls to duty and legitimized their (long over-looked) roles as critical governance actors, yet also was subject to resistance and reworking due to a combination of institutional histories, local politics, as well as happenstantial everyday encounters of ASHA work. The precarious employment of ASHAs – in terms of basic remuneration as well as the great on-the-job risks that they have faced – underscores both the fragile nature of India's health governance system as well as possible political movements for its renewal. We conclude by calling for geographers to give greater attention to community health care workers as a key window into understanding the uneven ways in which health systems are made manifest on the ground, and their ability to respond to citizens' healthcare needs – both in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.     

A study of social‐market interventions in the shaping of the field of cultural production

A social analysis based on extensive evaluation of the Dance and Drama Awards programme reveals the social‐market political paradigm underpinning the formation of cultural policy in the UK underthe New Labour government. This specific intervention in the field of cultural production is placed in the context of broader government interventions in the cultural domain that seek to give respect to undervalued social and cultural groups. There is a political analysis of the characteristics of the social‐market political formation that underpin New Labour’s “affirmative” actions, and the political strategies informing the government’s “access” and “inclusion” agendas and their impact on the cultural and creative industries. The authors argue that the construction of a “social‐market” position in New Labour’s cultural policy represents an attempt to bridge or “hyphenate” the contradictory claims of social democracy, on the one hand, and economic fatalism, on the other. Despite the rhetoric of social and cultural “transformation”, the authors argue that a “faith” in the market prevents New Labour from transforming the political‐economic and cultural structures that generate economic and cultural injustices.     

转型中国的地方管治:海外学者的观点

改革开放以来,中国的城市与区域在分权化、全球化和市场化的宏观背景下,经历了剧烈的政治、经济和社会转型,地方管治成为城市地理学研究的热点问题。本文对海外研究中国地方管治的有关文献进行综述,总结了目前主流理论对中国地方管治变革的两种观点-强势的地方政府与低效的地方政府,并做出评述。研究同时也指出深化中国地方管治研究和地方政府间关系研究的新方向。     

Developing geographic information infrastructures for local government: the role of trust

The United States's National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) model presumes that the local government agencies of counties and municipalities will share their geographic information freely with government agencies of regions, states and federal agencies. This article takes up the issue of local government involvement in the NSDI by asking the question: why should local governments involve themselves in the NSDI? This question is informed by considering the social and technological imbrication of the NSDI. One of the oldest spatial data infrastructure projects, the NSDI offers insights into the complexity of implementing infrastructure in federal models of shared governance. This article focuses on the political and financial dimensions of developing infrastructure among local governments. Trust is quintessential at this level of government. Local government agency activities experience an inherently closer coupling with political representatives and with different agencies in both intramunicipal and intermunicipal activities. Building the NSDI is fundamentally an interagency act and thus a matter of trust. Trust is a key issue in the development of the NSDI, as the results of a study of Kentucky local government agencies indicate.     

Polycentricity and the Hollow State: Exploring Shared Personnel as a Source of Connectivity in Fragmented Urban Systems

The Ecology of Games (EoG) theory couples institutional rational choice with social network theory, articulating how transaction costs, social capital, and collective action dilemmas shape networks and network outcomes in polycentric governance systems. EoG literature has often focused on social–relational ties across organizational boundaries. However, jurisdictional fragmentation and increased reliance on private contractors in local public service delivery foster another source of network connectivity—shared personnel who work for multiple service providers. Drawing upon novel data of organizational personnel from more than 500 special purpose entities responsible for delivering drinking water to local neighborhoods in the Houston metro area in the state of Texas (United States), we examine how managerial, technical, and financial service delivery personnel connect otherwise independent organizations. We find that districts regulated by a common groundwater management agency and districts which contract with one another are both more likely to share technical and managerial personnel. By studying special districts that have overlapping personnel, we broaden the scope of the EoG framework to include additional layers of governance network complexity. As individual bureaucrats and service professionals play a key role in information transfer and innovation diffusion across organizations, shared personnel networks merit consideration as a mechanism for coordination and collective problem solving in fragmented urban systems.     

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

This article scrutinises attempts by the British Foreign and Colonial Office to control information in its colonies between 1946 and 1950. Several factors combined to alter the ground on which colonial officials operated in this period: an emerging ‘Cold War’ between Britain and its wartime Soviet ally, international debates about creating an enforceable catalogue of ‘human rights' and a heightened emphasis on public relations within British colonies as a strategy for imperial governance. These factors converged in the response of colonial officials to the writing of one of the most notorious anti-colonial activists in Britain at the time, George Padmore. By analysing British Colonial Office reports of Soviet propaganda in their colonies, the article suggests new analysis about some of the ways in which the rhetoric of the Cold War impacted on Britain's approach to empire after the Second World War.     

Creative Copenhagen: Globalization,Urban Governance and Social Change

The introduction of 'creativity' and the 'creative city' in imagineering Copenhagen and in strategies for developing its urban competitiveness is analysed from a perspective on relations between processes of globalization, developments in urban government/governance and social geographic change. This perspective problematizes what on the surface seems to be an unequivocally positive quality ('creative') and goal ('creativity'). We argue there is a need to recognize the social costs of developments that are glossed over by the creative city rhetoric, including diminished representative democracy, social and geographic polarization and considerable displacement of the marginalized.