John M Jenkins

Destination place identity and regional tourism policy

Tourism is essentially place-based and involves the production of destination identity at different scales. At any one time, organizations at national, regional and local levels are actively engaged in presenting and promoting place identity in order to attract tourists and increase market share. The drive to establish distinct destination identity in the tourism market place is derived from a range of complex and competing interests manifested at global and local scales. This paper focuses upon interconnections between place identity and the institutions of tourism planning and policy-making at the regional level. In New South Wales, Australia, regional tourism organizations are contentious. It is argued that more profound insights into the problems and challenges of regional tourism organizations can be gained by examining the global–local dialectic.

Tourism cognitive mapping of unfamiliar environments.

Abstract Cognitive mapping is advocated as a methodology for exploring the way in which tourists come to know the areas that they visit. Analysis of sketch maps drawn by visitors to Coffs Harbour (Australia) revealed that tourists developed cognitive images of resort areas quickly and that cognitive maps are influenced by experience, both in the immediate sense of the length of time spent in the area and in the more general sense of the lifestyle to which the tourist is accustomed. However, the learning of unfamiliar environments appears to be rather more complex than predicted by views such as the anchor point theory of environmental learning.

Federal-State Relations and Tourism Public Policy, New South Wales, Australia

In Australia, it has become academic dogma that federalism is a problem rather than an asset. Nevertheless, federalism has significant advantages and is likely to remain an important model for systems of government worldwide. In the case of tourism, overlapping jurisdictions, multiple accountabilities and countervailing power are generally seen to impede effective tourism policy development. This paper goes beyond criticisms of federalism, to investigate the dynamics of federal–State relations in an effort to understand how cooperation in the tourism policy arena can be improved. Using a case study of New South Wales, this paper examines the effects of government personalities, political cycles, shifts in organisational structures and divergent interpretations of globalisation on governments interest in cooperation.