Driving pro-environmental change in tourist destinations: encouraging sustainable travel in National Parks via partnership project creation and implementation

© 2016 Taylor & Francis. This paper explores a key challenge in introducing more sustainable transport practices at destinations: achieving modal shift in visitor travel from cars to physically active or public transport to reduce tourism's environmental impacts. It centres on using partnership led projects bringing together the many public and private sector organisations involved, to drive destination change and development. To date, research has centred on pro-environmental change for individuals and individual organisations: little is known about the mechanisms of pro-environmental change via complex multi-partner organisations. The paper reports research into the processes involved in successful projects to provide alternatives to car travel in three UK National Parks by using partnerships to obtain funding and implement change. Based on case studies informed by in-depth interviews with key stakeholders involved in pro-environmental change implementation, narratives are analysed to explain the change process, and mapped against existing literature and theories of change. Conclusions show the role of inspired individuals, supportive senior management, strong governance, better visitor experiences and, most significantly, communication and communication of the benefits of change to stakeholders. The research suggests why and how change occurs in partnerships, contributes to better theories of change and offers guidance on understanding and implementing change processes worldwide

The Conundrum of Order: The Concept of Governance from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

The term governance has made an impressive career in a number of disciplines concerned with regulation, order and law. This chapter draws on insights from legal studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, history and geography to paint a multifaceted picture of existing, competing and complementing approaches to the concept of governance. For reasons of space, the chapter can but point to the different variations on a theme, as governance occupies an ambivalent place in past and present discourses on political (or, legal or economic) order and society. It is argued that beyond pointing to crucial phases of methodological and theoretical transformation within different disciplines such as the often perceived transition ‘from government to governance’, governance is itself a deeply interdisciplinary concept