Jim Macbeth

This report presents the findings of an interview--‐based study undertaken of campers’ experiences in two Western Australian national parks: Warren National Park and Karijini National Park. The overall aim of the study was to describe and analyse the desired and realised experiences of these campers and explore the meanings that campers attributed to these experiences. This report also describes the characteristics of these camping visitors, their perceptions of management and their opinions regarding camping in national parks compared with caravan parks.

In mid-2005 the project team was commissioned with the task of gathering baseline data to assess potential socio-economic impacts from the expansion of sanctuary zones in Ningaloo Marine Park on visitors and residents in the Northern Gascoyne and to make a preliminary assessment of any short-term impacts. Sanctuary zones are areas where commercial and recreational fishing are not permitted. With offshore recreational fishing (referred to as ‘boat fishing’ in this report) and, to a lesser extent, extractive-based diving, being popular activities undertaken by residents and also visitors to the Northern Gascoyne region of Western Australia, it was the task of the project team to gather baseline data on human usage of the Marine Park against which later studies might be assessed. The sanctuary zones were gazetted at the end of November 2004, with legislation enforcing restrictions on recreational fishing within the zones introduced in September 2005. It emerged during the course of the study that at least some visitors were under the false impression that sanctuary zone restrictions were already in force in December 2004. This obviously places a question mark over the degree to which ‘baseline’ data collected prior to September 2005 could be considered a pristine, pre-change measure of human usage, with sanctuary zone extension impacts perhaps already commencing before the beginning of the project period. For this reason, the project team incorporated various retrospective data-gathering methods to determine a baseline measure. During the course of the project, it was also realised that data sources were relatively poor for the Ningaloo region, and that a significant part of the problem seemed to be a lack of awareness and commitment to robust social and economic monitoring by key agencies. Therefore, an additional objective, devised later in the project, was to propose a set of recommendations for policy makers in order to prioritise the need for robust social and economic monitoring beyond (and complementary to) external research initiatives such as the CSIRO Ningaloo Cluster Project which is now underway. The report seeks to cater to two types of readers—those who are interested in the particular changes that resulted from the sanctuary zone changes to the Ningaloo Marine Park, and those that are interested in the challenges of tourism monitoring and socio-economic impact assessments in protected areas and regional destinations more generally. A key principle put forward in the report is that to understand the effects of any one factor on visitation in a region (in this case, sanctuary zone changes), the effects of all other relevant variables affecting visitation to the region also need to be comprehensively understood, if only for the purpose of ruling out confounding factors. Like most regional tourism destinations in Australia, a range of theories (one might call them ‘myths’) circulate regarding the key factors underlying visitation patterns in the Northern Gascoyne, and it was perhaps coincidental that radical shifts were occurring with some of these factors, such as rising fuel prices and changes in the international and domestic tourism markets, at the same time as the new Ningaloo Marine Park Management Plan came into effect. Disentangling the potential impacts from these different factors was an important task for the project team. Consequently, within the limitations of the available data sets, the report offers a cursory understanding of tourism patterns in the Northern Gascoyne that will be of use to various stakeholders interested in matters above and beyond sanctuary zones and impact assessments.

As demand grows for tourism opportunities within Australian protected areas, partnerships are increasingly seen as the way forward in dealing with the variety of interests involved and ensuring that sustainability goals are pursued. Previous tourism partnership research has not made the most of opportunities to consult related literature from a broad range of disciplines and use associated theoretical developments as a basis for analysis. This technical report addresses this gap through a multi-disciplinary review of partnerships research to reconcile the often multifarious definitions of partnership and allied concepts, such as collaboration and cooperation, and the various meanings given to success, as well as to identify factors which might impact upon partnership success or failure. Eight theoretical perspectives are explored, covering social exchange theory, adoption and diffusion of innovation, environmental dispute resolution (EDR), social representation theory, network theory, stakeholder theory, social capital theory and the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework. Theoretical constructs offering the greatest potential for framing future research into successful tourismprotected area partnerships were social capital theory and EDR, with application of the IAD framework to cover any remaining gaps. This review suggests that it is important to consider as broad a range of factors as possible, not only those that are easy to measure. As such, factors such as administrative setting and the availability of resources, which are under-represented in the partnerships research, but intuitively seem to play a part in partnership success, should be considered. These findings provide a robust platform for further research that will be progressed as part of the broader study of which this review formed a foundational part.

This project set out to use existing background research and facilitate development of heritage trails linking the Western Australian Shires of Woodanilling, Katanning, Kent, Broomehill, Gnowangerup, Tambellup and Cranbrook in the south-west region known as the Central Great Southern. There is a strong interest by Shire Councils and individuals in the Central Great Southern region to fully develop the tourism potential of the area based on their past colonial heritage. The primary aim was to outline a series of drive trails connecting the participating shires that could encourage self-drive tourists to visit the region. Rather than developing a tourism concept focusing on the region as a destination, the drive trails were designed as transit routes across the Central Great Southern, connecting established popular tourism destinations in neighbouring areas, such as Perth, Albany and Esperance.

The purpose of this toolkit (phase 2) is to work together with the practitioners guide (phase 1) to assist local governments to develop the capacity to deal with tourism in their local destinations. The toolkit is not intended to provide specific solutions to specific problems. Rather, it is aimed at assisting local government and local government (tourism) officers to better understand the issues and problems they currently face, and to identify broad management strategies and principles that can be used to address these issues. It may be a simple matter that, after working through this toolkit you conclude you are doing things correctly. Or you may draw the conclusion that the issues are far more complex than you originally anticipated, and it is necessary to seek further expert advice. You may identify particular aspects of tourism management that require further examination or that tourism needs to be organised differently. Whatever the outcome, this toolkit will assist in identifying the right questions to ask and how to get useful answers. It is a fundamental tenet of this project that better understanding of problems and issues is an essential forerunner to the identification of appropriate management strategies and solutions.

In Western Australia, similar to other parts of Australia, opposition to large scale development has been strong in recent times, well organised and effective, with proposed developments not proceeding as planned. This was, for instance, the case with a large scale development proposal at Maud’s Landing in the north west of Western Australia, which had attracted a great deal of predominantly negative publicity. It appears that the group of opponents to such development has broadened over recent years to include both the general public and tourists themselves. Notably, this ‘general public’ opposition is far wider than the residents of planned development sites and appears to include the general population and visitors to specific regions alike. Given that this opposition appears to be strengthening there is a need for research to understand what needs to be improved to ensure future tourism developments are supported by the ‘community of interest’. By understanding the responses of the ‘community of interest’ to tourism development, whether support or opposition, development alternatives can be selected, which will minimise negative social and environmental impacts and maximise support for tourism development. The overall purpose of this study is to describe, analyse and explain the political processes which led to the Western Australian government’s decision to reject the proposed resort and marina complex at Maud’s Landing in July 2003. The project’s findings are presented in two parts; first, an introduction to the case study area is given, followed by a detailed analysis of the history of the events and documents surrounding the proposed development at Maud’s Landing. Second, primary research with the ‘community of interest’ is presented in an effort to explore and understand the attitudes and perceptions of intrastate, interstate and international visitors to tourism development at Maud’s Landing.

Prosper is a national tourism research project commissioned by the Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre (STCRC) and managed by the Centre for Regional Tourism Research, Southern Cross University. Prosper involves researchers from Southern Cross University, the University of Queensland and Murdoch University. Prosper aims to develop context specific and holistic models for evaluating the capacity of regional communities to use innovation as a means of harnessing tourism’s social, economic and environmental value. This document presents the findings from the preliminary Prosper case study conducted in the northern New South Wales community of Woodburn. The core of the Prosper program is a series of case studies of regional tourism innovation potential. Prosper is not designed to tell case study communities what tourism development they should undertake. Rather, the research allows increased understanding of the way tourism operates in these communities, and identifies potential challenges the community will face in trying to develop tourism. At the same time, it identifies some strengths that can be brought to the tourism planning and management processes in those communities. The key questions for the Prosper project are: 1. What structures in regional tourism management work best in different systems to create environments of innovation? 2. Where in the system (or external to it) do regional tourism innovations come from, and how can regional tourism managers recognise an innovative idea or action? 3. What techniques can be used to evaluate the impacts of innovation on dimensions of regional development? 4. What aspects of social, cultural, economic and political capital are important to innovation and strategic development? Like all research, Prosper will be of use to communities if there are local champions committed to taking the information and acting on it. Those champions will need to understand the way in which the research has been produced, and will view the research as one component of the knowledge required to inform destination management. This report contains the findings from the Prosper pilot study. It introduces the reader to the case study, Woodburn, with a range of descriptive information about the general township, as well as issues such as social and economic capacities and the tourism system. This overview then enables the report to present an analysis of Woodburn using a collection of innovation capacity contexts presented in the ‘methodologies’ report cited above. Emerging from the Woodburn case study analysis is a checklist of Woodburn capacity for innovation indicators relating to each innovation context observed during the analysis. The checklist will highlight the utility of the Prosper research approach by providing a resource to help better understand the regional framework and interrelationships needed for regional communities, in this case Woodburn, to engage in innovative regional tourism development. A glossary has been added to the rear of this report to help clarify any terms that seem unclear or ambiguous.

Prosper has delivered a three part model for assessing and enhancing the value of tourism in regional areas. The first part of the model uses simple indicators to provide an assessment of the economic, social, and environmental value attached to tourism. An indicators approach was adopted following extensive review of the application of more complex approaches to regional economic analysis. The review found that complex approaches are unlikely to produce results of sufficient validity and applicability to warrant their high resource costs (time, money, and skills). Complex models are also more difficult to maintain. The economic value is represented through quantitative indicators relating to employment and the number of businesses in tourism related sectors. These are all relative indicators (for example, proportion of all businesses which are businesses in the tourism sector or proportion of change in employment that can be attributed to change in tourism related employment). These indicators are drawn from national data sets which provide information for statistical local areas and/or postcode areas. This offers the opportunity to develop and deliver consistent national profiles through a vehicle such as Decipher. National standard data sets are supplemented in the model by more qualitative assessments of tourism’s contribution to the local economy made by business operators through interviews or surveys. Again, tracking the change in these assessments over time is the key to the model. Social and environmental values are substantially more difficult to assess. The Prosper case studies have included qualitative assessments derived from business and community meetings, local government and other administrative documents, media and a simplified network analysis identifying the extent to which community based organisations interact with the delivery of tourism services. Data sets have been identified which would allow a quantitative analysis of the extent to which tourism activity (visitor movements, business activity, business construction) encroaches on environmentally sensitive areas or is responsible for redevelopment or preservation of built environments. The case studies have not been able to implement this quantitative analysis. The second part of the model conducts a ‘diagnostic’ assessment of the capacity in the region to harness the value of tourism through innovation. Innovation is seen as a very important mechanism for both identifying regional issues and developing responses to those issues. Innovation is widely accepted in the literature as a driver of economic growth, and concepts such as ‘systems of innovation’ and ‘regional systems of innovation’ have become common in understanding how that innovation can be encouraged and placed within technical or geographical contexts. The diagnostic element of the Prosper model uses a series of techniques (including historical document analysis, interviews, and network analysis) to investigate the characteristics of region’s human tourism resources in relation to their ‘innovation potential’. Innovation potential is influenced by: • Economic competence – the extent to which those resources include capacity to manage projects and implement new ideas; • Clustering of resources – the spatial relationships between tourism attractions and amenities and nontourism amenities and resources which may be critical in the delivery of tourism product; • Networks – the social and professional relationships between tourism attractions and amenities and nontourism amenities and resources which may be critical in the delivery of tourism product; • Development blocks – the existence of sufficient new resources or new ways of looking at existing resources to provide opportunities for innovation. Development blocks need also to be a source of tension or disequilibrium so that their use is contested and therefore options more likely to be scrutinized as to their viability; • Entrepreneurship – the capacity for human resources to engage in new tasks and drive activity; • Critical mass – the relationship between the capacity to supply tourism product, and the capacity to access sufficient and appropriate markets (including resident markets) to support ongoing supply; • Local government – the extent to which local government considers tourism an important issue and is willing to engage in the innovation process • Production and distribution of knowledge – the extent to which the history and current status of tourism is understood and communicated, and the degree to which stakeholders can access and apply new information for identifying the potential or need for change, assessing the viability of projects, and evaluating activities; • Social, political and cultural capital – the strength of the social, political and cultural environments, and the degree to which those environments can be effectively harnessed to support tourism innovation. The third part of the model uses ‘visioning’ techniques (drawing in part on experiences from Sustainable Tourism CRC projects on ‘Gold Coast Visioning’ led by Professor Bill Faulkner at Griffith University, and research by Walker, Lee, Goddard, Kelly & Pedersen, 2005) to engage stakeholders in developing strategies for identifying tourism value issues (based on the community awareness of the value of tourism, aspirations for enhancing value, and strategies for addressing deficiencies in innovation potential). A number of processes are available for applying visioning techniques. Our case studies typically involved community leaders accepting ownership of the results of the application of the first components of the model and, in a facilitated or nonfacilitated way, delivering these results broadly through the community. In some cases, strategies emerged entirely from within the region, while in others, the research team was further engaged to collate strategy suggestions and summarise the arguments attached to these suggestions. In most cases, the final case study write-up included reference to suggestions which appeared likely to be carried forward. The Prosper model was tested in thirteen case studies, not simply to establish whether the relationships hypothesized between innovation potential and harnessing the value of tourism could be observed, but also to establish to extent to which participating regions viewed the application of the model as important and worthwhile in their attempts to move forward. The case studies were a mix of five new studies conducted using the Prosper model in a direct way and meta-analysis of eight previous case studies. The short time frame for the research (2 and ½ years) and the relatively long term nature of change made it impossible to design the research to evaluate the success of the strategies developed or any specific innovations in new case studies, so the metaanalysis studies were significant in this respect. The case studies strongly supported the second part of the model in particular, and the research served as an influential tool for many of the case study communities who were able to implement programs of value monitoring (through quantitative or qualitative means), identify ways in which their systems of innovation could be strengthened, and develop context specific mechanisms for identifying and assessing the feasibility of tourism development proposals. The research has delivered a number of outputs which may be used in dissemination and commercialisation of the intellectual property. A stand-alone publication reviewing the applicability of various economic value assessment techniques to regional tourism has been produced. A quick guide to the Prosper model and assessing whether application of the model would assist a particular region has been drafted, and is slated for development in collaboration with Sustainable Tourism CRC. A detailed methodology specification has been prepared, and may be used as the basis of consulting services or the conduct of further case studies. The quantitative data sets (Census, Sensis, TTF employment analysis, labour force statistics etc.) may be made available through Decipher and included in a structured Decipher product which facilitates analysis and interpretation. A book containing research results of the thirteen case studies and an overview of the relationship between those case studies and the Prosper model has been edited by Dean Carson and Dr Jim Macbeth and has been submitted to the Sustainable Tourism CRC editorial team led by Professor Chris Cooper at the University of Queensland.