Journal of Sustainable Tourism
Editors: Bill Bramwell (Sheffield Hallam University) and Bernard Lane (Visiting Research Fellow, Sheffield Hallam University)
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Volume: 7 Number: 3 Page: 240–259
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Collaboration on Tourism Policy Making: Environmental and Commercial Sustainability on Bonaire, NA
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Steven Parker
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This paper applies Gray's model of collaboration to deliberations concerning sustainable tourism on The Island Territory of Bonaire in the Caribbean. It examines stakeholder logic and strategy in attempting
to coordinate three policy areas during the period 1993-98: those relating to hotel-room inventory, airline capacity and water pollution abatement. Relying on in-depth interviews with key participants,
the paper analyses how Bonaire stakeholders attempted to pursue both economic and ecological approaches to sustainability by combining these three. It also examines why this effort has not yet been successful,
an examination that emphasises a decline in tourist demand and an approach to collaboration that was unsystematic and lacking in institutionalised structure. Implications for collaboration theory include
the findings that there is vulnerability in informal modes of organisation and that progress from one stage of deliberation to the next does not necessarily require closure at the earlier stage. Implications
for sustainable tourism include the confirmation of hypotheses concerning the critical role played by economies of scale and policy interdependence.
© Channel View Publications 1999
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