Sustainable water demand management in the hotel sector: a policy network analysis of Singapore

Abstract

Water use in the tourism industry is a vital sustainability issue in destination development. Achieving sustainable water demand management (WDM) is challenging and requires destination stakeholder collaboration for effective participatory policymaking. Taking the WDM of Singapore’s hotel sector as a case, this article applies a policy network analysis to prevailing stakeholder collaboration based on public policy documents published between 2001 and 2015. Thirty-three interconnected organisational stakeholders and 76 policy domains were identified. Longitudinal analyses revealed structural changes in stakeholder collaboration during WDM policy development. The findings also indicate that the policy stakeholders of WDM are becoming increasingly diverse, and with this expansion in stakeholder participation, the collaboration network has evolved from being simple to remarkably complex. This article also discusses the relationship between policy stakeholders and policy domains, revealing that the responsibility, available resources, and interests of stakeholders are the main factors influencing their policy preferences in this discourse. The results enrich our understanding of inter-stakeholder relationships and the dynamic relational structure of interdisciplinary policy system.

Keywords:

• Sustainable water demand management
• policy network analysis
• hotel sector
• policy documents
• Singapore

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Institute of Water Policy at National University of Singapore and the Public Utilities Board (Singapore) for excellent support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Total population consists of Singaporean residents including Singapore citizens, permanent residents, and non-residents (e.g. work permit holders, dependents of Singaporean residents, and student pass holders) (Department of Statistics Singapore, 2018).

2 Stakeholder groups refer to purposively stratified stakeholder groups in the private and third sectors (e.g. hotel entities and universities).

3 UCINET VI was used for network analysis in this study; other popular tools include Pajek, visone, Tulip, ORA, NodeXL, and the SNA package in R (Hennig, Brandes, & Pfeffer, 2012).

4 Netdraw is a social network visualisation software that enables graphic representation of networks including relationships and attributes (Borgatti et al., 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The University of Otago Postgraduate Publishing Bursary (Doctoral).

Notes on contributors

Xiao Hu

Dr. Xiao Hu is a lecturer at the International College, Krirk University, Thailand. He received his Ph.D. in Tourism from University of Otago, New Zealand in 2017. His academic interests are sustainability in tourism and hospitality, tourism stakeholder management, and tourism policy network analysis.

Tianyu Ying

Dr. Tianyu Ying is an Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism and Hotel Management, Zhejiang University, China. His research interests lie in the sustainability issues in tourism management from a social perspective. He also has a methodological interest in applying social network analysis on various topics related to tourism and hotel management.

Brent Lovelock

Dr. Brent Lovelock is a professor in the Department of Tourism, University of Otago. He has a broad interest in sustainable tourism, and his research addresses policy and planning, and visitor experience from a sustainability perspective. He is a co-author of the book The Ethics of Tourism.

Sarah Mager

Dr. Sarah Mager is a hydrologist in the Department of Geography at the University of Otago, with research interests into water use, sustainability, water quality and quantity. These interests converge on how water is transformed through human intervention in both developed and developing nations.