Stakeholder participation in tourism destination planning: Another case of missing the point?

A legacy of adverse impacts from tourism activity has led to widespread, and generally well accepted, calls for multiple stakeholder groups, in particular the resident community, to participate in the process of planning tourism activity within a destination. While this notion has infiltrated the rhetoric of governments’ worldwide, authors have questioned the extent to which stakeholder participation actually occurs in tourism destination planning practice. Indeed, some authors have claimed that despite the abundance of policy statements and documents endorsing the approach, such examples are still the exception rather than the rule. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate whether multiple stakeholder groups do actually participate in the tourism destination planning processes and determine the underlying motives, benefits and challenges of stakeholder cooperation and collaboration in this context. Focusing on the planning practices of local tourism destinations in Queensland, Australia, it was found that the resident community are often excluded from the planning process and, where they are involved, it is because of planning mandates as opposed to genuine motivations to engage in cooperative and collaborative planning. Additionally, the study found that some stakeholder groups have considerably more power than others and use this influence to limit the involvement of the resident community to token engagement. The research highlights that destination planners and managers continue to ‘miss the point’ regarding the need for, and benefits of, engaging multiple stakeholder groups in the planning process