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Abstract
Community collaboration and participation are necessary to strengthen the effectiveness of tourism policy. This article aims to examine the tourism planning activity of public administration in fostering a collaborative approach. The article contributes to the debate on collaborative approach in tourism from the perspective of public administration. The research uses a case study and examines how Tuscany region applies a collaborative tourism planning approach using the Habermasian framework. Results underline the fundamental role of local government can be strengthened by an extensive stakeholder engagement process able to encourage broad representation and trust of stakeholder interest about public policies. Moreover, the collaborative approach by mixing the different point of view of stakeholders, produces a range of positive outcomes and increases the efficacy of tourism policies. However, the realization of the "ideal speech situation" is very difficult and may be undermined by the threatens highlighted in the study, such as the lack of financial resources, the claim to more homogeneous policies to increase tourism trends, the need to improve trust and collaboration between public and private, the difficulties in maintaining high level of attention and the widespread scepticism about the capability of public entities to understand priorities in defining tourism policies.
Key words: tourism planning, collaborative planning, ideal speech situation, Tuscany tourism, Habermas.
Introduction
Tourism provides advantages for a community by increasing economic benefits, improving the community infrastructure and quality of life, and increasing employment rates (Hatipoglu et al., 2016). According to the UNWTO (2019), total international tourism exports increased by 4% to reach 1.7 USD trillion and tourist arrivals grew by 5%. This trend is of interest here in southern and Mediterranean Europe, with Italy, Greece, Portugal and Croatia showing a particularly good performance.
Two challenging theoretical areas in the social science literature have arisen in public tourism planning in the last few years (Petrova and Hristov, 2016). First, one body of study has analysed the socio-political context of tourism planning (Hanrahan and McLoughlin, 2015; Nunkoo and Gursoy, 2016). The second body highlights collaborative planning approaches that take a critical view, looking for conflict and turning it into solutions (Almeida et al., 2017).
Local governments play an active and central role in defining and facilitating tourism strategies. Although many authors agree about the sharing...