A historical analysis of tourism policy implementation by local government

Abstract

Local government is critical to tourism policy delivery. This paper examines the failure of the public and private tourism sectors to educate local government policy-makers in understanding tourism and related policy issues, leading to poor tourism policy implementation at the local level. The paper presents a historical and descriptive analysis of policy development and documents how local government tourism policy and its associated processes came into being in New Zealand. There is little academic historical research examining institutional and political frameworks of local government and how they impact on tourism policy implementation. Both primary and secondary data sources such as interviews and administrative and archived documents have been used. This finding illustrates a lack of understanding of tourism by central and local government bureaucrats and local government. Due to the lack of historical policy knowledge there is an inability to measure whether progress is being made.

Keywords:

• local government
• regional tourism
• New Zealand
• tourism policy