Tourism, regional development and the 'new regionalism' : the case of the Hurunui District, New Zealand

Abstract

In New Zealand, as elsewhere, the tourism sector is used overtly as a tool for regional development. This is based largely on the assumed re-distributive effects of tourism spending and the regional spread of tourist attractions and icons. In addition, tourist visitation and expenditure patterns are held to support social goals around retention of regional (including rural) population and service bases, infrastructure and communications. Given the public-private sector partnership essential to tourism initiation, growth and management, it is hardly surprising that tourism, arguably more than any other sector, is actively supported and encouraged as a tool for regional economic development. This has significant implications for understanding the public sector financial support for tourism, as tourism sits the crossroads of economic theory and social action. This paper reviews the role of public policy over the last twenty years in shaping tourism development in New Zealand, and critiques the movement away from economic neo-liberalism to more recent policy paradigms informed by the ideologies of the New Regionalism. An exploratory study of the Hurunui District (New Zealand) is used to illustrate the way in which local government has, under this ideological shift, turned increasingly to tourism in order to address issues of regional development within their territorial boundaries. This paper concludes by noting that although tourism has a number of features which make it attractive for the implementation of regional development agendas, the multi-scalar attribute of the present-day New Regionalism-inspired policy framework presents a complex and potentially unwieldy framework from the perspective of tourism stakeholders, including public and private sector planners, managers and practitioners.