Stakeholder participation in regional tourism planning: Brazil's Costa Dourada project.
type: CreativeWork
description: Many developing countries are increasingly using tourism as a tool for regional development. While it is expected that tourism can bring substantial benefits, there is also evidence that it can entail negative social, cultural and environmental impacts, and clearly tourism at the regional scale requires careful planning in order to promote sustainable development. While tourism has been planned for decades, there has been relatively little research on how to plan for tourism development at the regional scale in either developing or developed countries. There is growing acceptance that tourism planning at all geographical scales ought to involve broad participation so that the affected stakeholders are engaged in the decision-making. However, research on stakeholder participation in tourism planning has only very recently begun to draw on the valuable insights offered by collaboration theory. This research examines stakeholder participation in tourism planning based on a case study of the Costa Dourada project, a regional tourism initiative involving ten very poor municipalities in Alagoas State in north-east Brazil. The project sought to combine regular collaborative planning meetings involving a range of key stakeholders with consultation with a much larger number of parties affected by the project. The study examines the participation processes involved in the collaborative planning process, the extent to which collaboration fully emerges in the planning process, and the views of stakeholders not involved in the collaborative planning about the project and the planning process. Additionally, consideration is given to the extent to which the planning process was likely to promote co-ordinated planning and concern for the varied issues affecting the sustainable development of the region. The approach to the study was based on a conceptual framework that will be of use to other researchers, this being developed from literature on collaboration theory, stakeholder par…
abstract: Many developing countries are increasingly using tourism as a tool for regional development. While it is expected that tourism can bring substantial benefits, there is also evidence that it can entail negative social, cultural and environmental impacts, and clearly tourism at the regional scale requires careful planning in order to promote sustainable development. While tourism has been planned for decades, there has been relatively little research on how to plan for tourism development at the regional scale in either developing or developed countries. There is growing acceptance that tourism planning at all geographical scales ought to involve broad participation so that the affected stakeholders are engaged in the decision-making. However, research on stakeholder participation in tourism planning has only very recently begun to draw on the valuable insights offered by collaboration theory. This research examines stakeholder participation in tourism planning based on a case study of the Costa Dourada project, a regional tourism initiative involving ten very poor municipalities in Alagoas State in north-east Brazil. The project sought to combine regular collaborative planning meetings involving a range of key stakeholders with consultation with a much larger number of parties affected by the project. The study examines the participation processes involved in the collaborative planning process, the extent to which collaboration fully emerges in the planning process, and the views of stakeholders not involved in the collaborative planning about the project and the planning process. Additionally, consideration is given to the extent to which the planning process was likely to promote co-ordinated planning and concern for the varied issues affecting the sustainable development of the region. The approach to the study was based on a conceptual framework that will be of use to other researchers, this being developed from literature on collaboration theory, stakeholder par…
author: Araujo, Lindemberg Medeiros de
language: en
date published: 2000-11
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:31:00Z
provider: Sheffield Hallam University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Sheffield Hallam University