Of course the Government has a role!

It was an interesting start to class today. We began with a case study about a plantation in Costa Rica. Basically there was a viable piece of land that two people wanted for their own reasons. One was hotel that wanted to expand with good intentions for the environment and the other was a large company that wanted to build a banana plantation in Costa Rica. The problem was about decision-making. Should a new banana plantation be built into the community? What are its environmental impacts? Its social impacts? Should the hotel expand? Will it provide enough for the economy?

We assessed the different stakeholders in the case such as the banana plantation owner, the large company, the mayor, the locals, the scientists, the hotel operator etc.. and viewed it from their perspectives. What was interesting was how hard it was for everyone to come to one conclusion. And we made a decision in the last 15 mins we had to work on the case. The lesson to take away from this is that decision-making is very difficult and this process happens everywhere and the stakes are usually higher. And solutions are usually government responsible ie) in the end everyone points their fingers at the government to do something when there is a problem. We were lucky enough that the government was there but often times in the real word there is no rep from the government or someone key is missing from the group of decision makers. Notice how in our case study the point of view from a tourist was missing? *Ahh haaaa! Now you've realised.*

So to highlight here are some things I wanted to note about this week's lecture about the governance and the role of the government:

• One of the barriers to success in coming up with a consensus solution is: most people don't like to collaborate/cooperate. Especially in the tourism industry with our big egos (we don't want help from anyone)
• Greece exemplar: 
• Greece came up with laws for tourism development (plus one for Greece! :) )
• BUT...all the laws were made by the federal government
• They didn't include local businesses and the local government - they feel that there's no relevance to them so why would they follow any of the rules that they didn't take part in making?
• laws were vague - eg) how were they going to be enforced? by who?
• So...learn this: simply writing a law is not enough! 

(Dodds R, Sustainable Tourism Development, March 3rd, 2011)