Tod Jones

Balancing commercial and environmental needs: licensing as a means of managing whale shark tourism on Ningaloo reef

This paper explores the creation, significance and progression of the licensing systems employed to regulate whale shark tourism at Ningaloo Marine Park. Since 1993 mandatory whale shark tour operator licences have been offered through an evolving competitive tender process. A content analysis of the evolution of licence requirements revealed a progression from a minimalist approach to one covering a full range of detailed and audited sustainability indicators. A tour operators’ opinion survey was undertaken to understand industry issues and the impacts of the regulatory licensing system. Operators cited the need for business planning and offering a quality experience as their main challenges. Issues included cost pressures from local and global competitors. Few saw their own activities as being an environmental issue, and few saw regulation procedures as an issue. It is argued that further refinement of the licensing system is required to put its operations into a transparent, science-based context, and to offer incentives for improvements to rise above basic compliance. An explicit consideration of the balance between environmental regulation and commercial sustainability is needed to create a situation of perpetual improvement and provide best outcomes for all stakeholders, including operators, the local economy, the environment and guests.

Regional Planning and Resilient Futures: Destination Modelling and Tourism Development - the case of the Ningaloo Coastal Region in Western Australia

Abstract The Ningaloo Destination Model (NDM) is an approach that engages key stakeholders in a more participative learning process, with the implications of potential future changes clearly set out for all to see. The case study for this approach is a region in Western Australia that is home to a globally significant fringing coral reef. This paper focuses on how the process and use of the NDM project builds regional resilience to cope with disturbances to socioecological systems in the context of regional planning. The various stages of the development and use of the NDM are discussed. The paper concludes that the NDM needs more than good data and reliable modelling to contribute to regional planning; it also needs to encourage the characteristics that build regional resilience through the modelling process and model use.

Discovering wildlife tourism: a whale shark tourism case study

This paper investigates the different sources of information used by tourists to learn about a particular wildlife tourism activity, specifically, whale shark tourism at Ningaloo Marine Park in Western Australia. The findings from this research concur with previous studies of wildlife tourism showing that wildlife tourism operations are reliant on more informal and general forms of promotion, in particular word of mouth and guide books. Conversely, more deliberate marketing mechanisms, such as the internet and documentaries, are not extensively utilised. To disaggregate consumer preferences for various information sources, this article segments the population into more homogenous groups, thereby demonstrating distinct differences in the choice of information source based on the participants’ normal place of residence.

Heritage designation and scale: a World Heritage case study of the Ningaloo Coast

Abstract As heritage research has engaged with a greater plurality of heritage practices, scale has emerged as an important concept in Heritage Studies, albeit relatively narrowly defined as hierarchical levels (household, local, national, etcetera). This paper argues for a definition of scale in heritage research that incorporates size (geographical scale), level (vertical scale) and relation (an understanding that scale is constituted through dynamic relationships in specific contexts). The paper utilises this definition of scale to analyse heritage designation first through consideration of changing World Heritage processes, and then through a case study of the world heritage designation of the Ningaloo Coast region in Western Australia. Three key findings are: both scale and heritage gain appeal because they are abstractions, and gain definition through the spatial politics of interrelationships within specific situations; the spatial politics of heritage designation comes into focus through attention to those configurations of size, level and relation that are invoked and enabled in heritage processes; and researchers choice to analyse or ignore particular scales and scalar politics are political decisions. Utilising scale as size, level and relation enables analyses that move beyond heritage to the spatial politics through which all heritage is constituted.

Liberalism and Cultural Policy in Indonesia

The beginning of contemporary cultural policy in the West is tied to the emergence of liberalism and its formulation of the subjects of governance as free individuals. Culture was judged a field where the state could teach its subjects to exercise a ‘responsible and disciplined’ freedom without impinging on that freedom. In colonial contexts, indigenous subjects were judged incapable of exercising freedom responsibly and the state considered them to require a degree of state control thought inappropriate for Western subjects. In this paper, I explore how cultural policy in Indonesia has been influenced by engagement with these two applications of liberalism from the late colonial period until the present, against the background of a changing international climate and political events in Indonesia. I also address the post-Suharto period where, due to the absence of a strong political movement for reform to drive change and the decentralisation of a number of policy areas including culture, a variety of cultural policies reflecting a variety of engagements with these interpretations exist together. I demonstrate that understanding the complexity of the application of liberal methods of governance in a colonial and postcolonial context is central to appreciating the cultural policy of that location.

Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions

Since the 1970s, there has been a fraught yet hopeful Aboriginal cultural resurgence in Australia. An element of this movement has been the establishment of Aboriginal art centres and cultural centres across Australia. Using a comparative approach to Aboriginal art centres, this paper analyses the appearance and characteristics of the more recent Aboriginal cultural centres. The methods used are a review of the literature on Aboriginal art centres, and for the less-researched Aboriginal cultural centres, a case study. This paper posits that cultural centre characteristics are shaped through the formation of alliances made possible by the advent of land rights, an Aboriginal cultural turn amongst Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and changing approaches to regional development. While not themselves a movement that will lead to socio-economic change, these types of arts and heritage projects are aligned to such movements. With a larger scale and more central locations, Aboriginal cultural centres open up opportunities for larger and more diverse alliances, and therefore new opportunities for Aboriginal people’s participation, activism and expression.

Community Perceptions of a World Heritage Nomination Process: The Ningaloo Coast Region of Western Australia

ABSTRACT The remote Ningaloo Coast region, the location of Australias largest fringing coral reef, was designated as World Heritage (WH) in 2011 based on its outstanding natural values. In the past, the WH nomination process predominantly involved experts and state officials. More recently, local community involvement has become a required part of the process, representing a move toward participatory governance that can potentially influence WH designation. Understanding community perceptions of the WH nomination process provides insights into the consequences of community involvement. Interviews were conducted with key local community members involved in the Ningaloo Coast WH nomination. Interviews focused on the perceptions and experience of the nomination process and local meanings of WH designation. Results indicated that while there was support for WH designation, the nomination process was seen as controversial. Community involvement was dominated by local political and social concerns, mistrust, misinformation, and perceived unfairness. Concerns were influenced by past and current government actions and decision-making in the region. The article identifies some challenges associated with local community involvement in a WH nomination process. These challenges raise questions about participatory governance and how local communitys engage in the WH nomination process for coastal regions identified by experts as globally significant.

White sharks in Western Australia: threat or opportunity?

This paper explores the Western Australian Governments decision to disallow white shark tourism operations within the State. This policy was made during a time of an unprecedented number of shark bite fatalities in the region. We argue that the Governments verdict was reactive due to this abnormality and did not take a balanced and considered approach. White sharks are an important key stone species with a high conservation value, but a particularly negative popular image. Therefore, we contend that dismissing the prospect of tourism also dismissed the prospect of creating a more realistic representation of the species. In addition, economic benefits to a regional area and research opportunities on the species were also lost.

Knowledge that Acts: Evaluating the Outcomes of a Knowledge Brokering Intervention in Western Australia’s Ningaloo Region

Knowledge exchange involves a suite of strategies used to bridge the divides between research, policy and practice. The literature is increasingly focused on the notion that knowledge generated by research is more useful when there is significant interaction and knowledge sharing between researchers and research recipients (i.e., stakeholders). This is exemplified by increasing calls for the use of knowledge brokers to facilitate interaction and flow of information between scientists and stakeholder groups, and the integration of scientific and local knowledge. However, most of the environmental management literature focuses on explicit forms of knowledge, leaving unmeasured the tacit relational and reflective forms of knowledge that lead people to change their behaviour. In addition, despite the high transaction costs of knowledge brokering and related stakeholder engagement, there is little research on its effectiveness. We apply Park’s Manag Learn 30(2), 141–157 (1999); Knowledge and Participatory Research, London: SAGE Publications (2006) tri-partite knowledge typology as a basis for evaluating the effectiveness of knowledge brokering in the context of a large multi-agency research programme in Australia’s Ningaloo coastal region, and for testing the assumption that higher levels of interaction between scientists and stakeholders lead to improved knowledge exchange. While the knowledge brokering intervention substantively increased relational networks between scientists and stakeholders, it did not generate anticipated increases in stakeholder knowledge or research application, indicating that more prolonged stakeholder engagement was required, and/or that there was a flaw in the assumptions underpinning our conceptual framework.

Bomb the base in the bus: Public transport as intersections of a local popular culture in Padang, Indonesia

Most research into consumption and popular culture in Indonesia has been focused on the middle and upper classes who have been characterized as opting for a consumption-based culture over traditional ways of life. However, this paper on popular culture in Padang, West Sumatra, demonstrates that consumption is also an important element of workingclass Indonesians’ lives. The angkutan (modified vans used for public transport) and bis kota (city buses) in Padang in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra are brightly decorated with pictures and items depicting local and global themes. They are also equipped with expensive entertainment systems, produced by an expanding global marketplace, that broadcast local, Indonesian and foreign music in a variety of genres. In this paper, I explore the different factors that shape visual and musical expression on local transport. After providing a description of this popular cultural formation, I identify two constructions as the most prominent organizing sensibilities: a youth culture that celebrates modernity and the culture of an older generation that emphasizes an ongoing relationship to tradition and nature. Most research about the impact of increased consumption and globalization in Indonesia, and Southeast Asia more broadly, has tended to focus on the wealthy upper class. Richard Tanter and Kenneth Young, in their introduction to The Politics of Middle Class Indonesia, which helped to start a wave of analysis of the Indonesian middle class that flowed through the 1990s, set aside the broader question of class analysis in Indonesia in order to focus on the growing ‘middle class’. Analysis of consumption, due to its links with capitalism, class and status, germinated within this body of work about the Indonesian ‘new rich’, who have had the greatest capacity to engage in conspicuous consumption. Later publications, such as the widely read New Rich in Asia series, have continued the trend of locating analysis of consumption in Indonesia within the analysis of the ‘new rich’. However, the practices and politics of consumption have spread in Indonesia beyond the boundaries of the new rich. Other research into both consumption (Gerke 2000, 146–7) and the urban poor (Murray 1991, 138) indicates that consumerism also influences the habits of the urban poor and working classes. In this paper, I analyse a local expression of popular culture, made possible by the growth of consumption and globalization in the lives of the urban working class. Public transport in Padang in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra, with its loud music, personalized ornamentation and elaborately painted panels, indicates the impact of