Transforming tourism governance Futures thinking for destination community well being

Abstract

There have been growing calls for greater community engagement in tourism planning and governance. These are often accompanied by arguments for the use of more futures thinking to deal with the complex problems that tourism faces. This suggests that there is a need for different approaches to engaging destination communities in tourism planning. The aim of the present research was to evaluate such a different approach using futures thinking techniques focussed on destination community wellbeing (DCW) as the primary tourism planning goal. The outcomes of a series of community workshops that used the new futures thinking DCW approach were compared to the strategies described in relevant traditional tourism planning documents. This evaluation revealed that the residents in the futures and community wellbeing workshops generated more varied, specific, innovative and sustainable tourism futures than the traditional tourism planning processes. Tourism governance needs to focus more on empowering destination residents and on making specific links between aspects of tourism and changes in aspects of DCW.