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.

Notes

1. ‘Stakeholders’ is defined in this article as the groups and individuals whose activities and/or interests are impacted by a planning process.

2. The field of research into SESs encompasses adaptive management, which uses many of the concepts present in this article.

3. In this article we focus on the resilience of SES related to tourism and use the literature from this field (for instance, the work of the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org) and in Ecology and Society). Elements of this theory are present in economic geography (Martin & Sunley, 2007), but this has focused more on the application of such principles to social systems than on modelling and managing complexity in SESs.

4. It should be noted that one of the authors, David Wood, was Chair of the committee that oversaw the NSDO.

5. An initiative of the Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Cluster brings together multi-disciplinary researchers from six Australian universities, the Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre and the CSIRO Wealth of Oceans Flagship. The CSIRO is the Australian Federal Government's peak research body.

6. This includes government, tourism agencies and operators, research institutions, environmental groups, residents and tourists.

7. The groups can be divided into government authorities (7 agencies), tourism associations (3), tourism operators, accommodation providers, research institutions/projects (7), and other groups including local government councillors, tourists, residents, and Indigenous groups (6). For more information on the stakeholder groups, see Schianetz et al. (2009).

8. Other methods of communication were a regular newsletter that provided the latest data from the project and a technical report summarizing survey data collected for the project.

9. For a summary, see Jones et al. (2009).

10. This survey identified employment and cultural diversity as the perceived most positive impacts, and environmental damage, delinquent behaviour, crowding and housing dislocation as the perceived most negative impacts.

11. The technique employed in the NDM project for integrating research from different disciplines is described in more detail in Jones and Wood (2008).

12. The primary institution in the early and middle stages of the project was the NSDO as the institution with the primary responsibility for regional planning. The closure of the NSDO underlines the need for a broad base of support and involvement with planning research projects, as well as indicating the difficulties political cycles pose for long-term planning.