Social Capital, Tourism and Regional Development: SPCC as a Basis for Innovation and Sustainability

Abstract

Traditional views of regional development have focused on economic factors and potential innovation in technical and resource exploitation processes. Similarly, regional tourism development is usually couched in economic terms, such as number of jobs and increasing land values. This approach usually ignores the social and community aspects of tourism development; thus an alternative view argues that the community needs to be factored into our planning and development strategies to balance the traditional economic view. It is argued in this paper that fostering innovation in regional development is much more than a process of community consultation. Rather, what needs to be factored in is SPCC -social, political and cultural capital. This works in both directions; tourism development depends on a level of social, political and cultural capital in order to be a successful regional development tool (even in economic terms) while at the same time tourism development can be undertaken in a way that contributes to SPCC in the region. The paper outlines the key concepts of social capital, political capital and cultural capital. It does so within the context of regional tourism development and the concepts of systems of innovation and sustainable development.

Factors underlying farm diversification: the case of Western Australia’s olive farmers

“…Also, some operators were more proactive in their belief that they could foster market opportunities and create access to new markets through self-promotion and regional marketing. This aspect concerns their access to sufficient sources of social capital for promoting community-based initiatives such as tourism routes and reciprocal visitor marketing with tourism operators and local government authorities (Macbeth et al 2004). …”

There Is No Such Thing as Sustainable Tourism: Re-Conceptualizing Tourism as a Tool for Sustainability

“…The importance of multiple forms of capitals and QoL has been recognized in recent tourism and sustainability discussions [9,21,[27][28][29][30] with a growing number of researchers arguing for the use of QoL as way to assess the sustainability of tourism [9,21,27,28,30]. Moscardo, for example, proposes a QoL framework for considering tourism impacts that suggests that different types of tourist activity can be assessed according to their positive and negative impacts on each of the capitals listed in Table 1 [21].…”

Identifying Success Factors behind Partnerships for Managing Recreation and Tourism in Urban Fringe Parks

“…Flexibility is also coupled with adaptability, mentioned as critical in both cases outlined in this paper. The institutional analysis and development framework considers adaptability to change, as do social capital theory (Macbeth, Carson and Northcote, 2004) and environmental dispute resolution theory, although legislation has resulted in the latter becoming more prescriptive in recent years (Smith, 2006). Although trust was mentioned by a couple of participants, it did not dominate the data gathered as did other factors such as leadership and participation.…”