Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to look at the potential synergies between tourism and landscapes and examine the potential contribution of tourism to build social-ecological resilience in the ...Dutch Wadden.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors reveal how a social-ecological systems perspective can be used to conceptualize the Wadden as a coupled and dynamic system. This paper is a conceptual analysis that applies this approach to the Dutch Wadden. The data used for the inquiry primarily comes from a literature review.
Findings
The authors argue that the social-ecological systems perspective is a useful approach and could be used to improve the governance of multi-functional socio-ecological systems in coastal areas. Opportunities for synergies between tourism and landscapes have been overlooked. The authors consider that tourism and nature protection are potentially compatible and that the synergies should be identified.
Research limitations/implications
This paper is only a conceptual application rather than an empirical case study. Further research to actually apply the methodology is needed.
Practical implications
Managers of protected areas should consider applying a social-ecological systems approach.
Social implications
The views of a wide variety of stakeholders should be considered in landscape planning.
Originality/value
The value of this paper lies in the articulation of the social-ecological systems perspective as a way to identify and understand the complex interactions between tourism and landscape, and the potential synergies between them.
To make regions more resilient, a useful idea is that of synergy between tourism and landscape (i.e., a win-win situation). To help policymakers manage for synergy, we provide practical ...recommendations. Using the case of Terschelling (the Netherlands), an island that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listed Wadden Sea, we analyzed how policy and public opinion have been changing, and how multilevel governance is arranged. We recommend that: policymakers seek to understand the historical institutional context of a region; strive for integrated policy aimed at synergetic interactions; gain an overview of all stakeholders in the decision-making process; include all stakeholders; develop a shared story; co-create a clear vision for the future; but also allow flexibility in local implementation; and dare to experiment. Overall, we conclude that synergy is a promising concept that requires a different approach to decision-making.
The literature and practice of place promotion, place marketing and place branding lack a common understanding of what these three concepts mean and through what kind of policies they can be ...implemented. Although scholars have provided several theoretical frameworks and definitions, both scholars and practitioners (advisors, civil servants, public and private stakeholders, and politicians) often use them synonymously. This paper argues that recent developments in both theory and practice – with respect to place promotion, place marketing and place branding – provide an opportunity to address this conceptual confusion. In the academic debate, a common understanding is slowly emerging and in practice, a more integral approach is gaining ground. To contribute to these advances, we present the outline of a framework to help distinguish between place promotion, place marketing and place branding, along with a discussion on why we believe these differences (should) matter to practitioners.
•A classification of place promotion, place marketing, and place branding respectively as instruments for urban policy;•A conceptual reframing, highlighting and incorporating the differences between these three instruments;•Insights into how the current conceptual confusion causes asymmetries in both theory and practice.
In tourism, the concept of "benefit-sharing" refers to the idea that the benefits arising from tourism should be distributed across a wide range of stakeholders. We argue that the development of ...synergetic interactions between stakeholders involved in governance processes is a prerequisite for effective benefit-sharing from tourism in protected areas. Our stakeholder analysis of the actors with an interest in the island of Terschelling in the northern Netherlands revealed how relationships between stakeholders enable and/or constrain the sharing of benefits from tourism. Our analysis helped to understand the governance arrangements pertaining to the management of tourism in protected areas. We ascertained that the national forest management agency (Staatsbosbeheer), a large landowner on the island, is highly influential, but nevertheless often found it difficult to gain local support for its activities. The local government was also an important stakeholder, but was considered to sometimes constrain the development of tourism and thus limit the potential for benefit-sharing. Effective communication, good collaboration with stakeholders, and an attitude of openness were identified as being important preconditions for developing synergistic interactions between stakeholders.
In 2017, the University of Groningen (UG) in The Netherlands and DePaul University in the USA (DePaul) connected undergraduate students in geography courses using an Online International Exchange ...(OIE) assignment involving videoconferencing. Whereas many international OIE projects are designed on joint alignment principles connecting similar courses and developing similar aims and assignments, this project had a cross-course setup with diverging learning outcomes. In the UG course, OIE was a pretravel activity primarily aimed at developing disciplinary skills. DePaul implemented OIE as an intercultural awareness assignment. Through reflection on the design process and thematic analysis of student reflections, we conclude that the OIE introduced students in the DePaul course to international perceptions and encouraged self-reflection, whilethe OIE stimulated disciplinary skills and introduced intercultural awareness to the UG course. Moreover, OIE stimulated cross-cultural project management skills, increasing awareness of differing educational and urban contexts and thereby training the students in global citizenship. Therefore, this cross-course OIE shows that adapting OIE design to local curricular needs using pre-existing courses can enhance and deepen disciplinaryspecific learning outcomes through cross fertilization, and may create unexpected new learning outcomes. This expands the potential application and benefits of OIE for the internationalization of higher education.
Content analysis is a valuable tool to identify changes in policy. By analysing historical documents, policymakers and planners can improve their understanding of the institutional context in which ...decisions were made. Using the Island of Terschelling in the UNESCO World Heritage Wadden region of the northern Netherlands as our example, we show how content analysis can be used to understand the historical institutional context. We analysed policy and planning documents from 1945 to 2015, which was supported by semi-structured interviews with local key informants. We specifically considered tourism–landscape interactions. Although there were fluctuations between socio-economic development and nature protection over time, we found that there has been an increasing awareness of synergy. Synergies are crucial to balance nature protection with socio-economic development and to increase the social-ecological resilience of regions. We conclude that, by using content analysis, local documents can be used as a proxy for the institutional context.
•Understanding the historical and institutional context can help local policymakers.•Content analysis is a valuable tool to identify the changing dynamics of policy.•The orientation of policy and plans (e.g. re landscape and tourism) fluctuates.•Acknowledging synergies has historically been limited in policy and plans.•There should be greater focus on the synergies between tourism and landscape.
A visual content analysis of photos of 216 roadside memorials in the Netherlands was undertaken together with 24 interviews with the people who constructed them to understand how they deal with ...traumatic death. Friends urgently need to memorialize the deceased and establish spontaneous memorials. They place meaningful objects at the place of death, not necessarily indicating the deceased's identity. In contrast, permanent memorials identify who died and re-embody that person and are primarily established by parents. By transforming the death site into a place of care, parents continue their role as nurturers. Differences in types of memorials are discussed.
Italy was unified in 1861. As part of the process of nation-building, a mandatory free-of-charge primary school system was established. Whereas the new school system greatly contributed to the ...modernization of the country, its initial design did not considerably reduce regional disparities in human capital, with Southern regions lagging behind. The paper studies the effects of the heterogeneous territorial diffusion of literacy during the post-unification period (1871-1911) on economic outcomes of Italian provinces 100 years later. We exploit the exogenous variations in the territorial spread in literacy rates arising from the gradual building and expansion of the railway network across provinces. We find evidence that provinces with a higher territorial diffusion of literacy in the post-unification period today have higher income per capita, lower unemployment and greater educational attainment.
This paper adds to our knowledge and understanding of the time and space dimensions of the shift from an urban penalty to an urban premium effect on the biological standard of living in the second ...half of the nineteenth century. Although in the literature there is general agreement that urban-rural relations are part of the explanation of declining stature in the period of early economic growth (the so-called Komlos paradox), little is known about its exact timing and spatial dimensions. We use the province of Fryslân, the Netherlands, 1850–1900 as a case study to take a step towards filling this knowledge gap. The area is known for the early modernization of its agriculture, mainly specializing in dairy farming. We would expect a clear development towards an urban premium before 1900, but seek to investigate its timing and placing. This involves running a panel data regression on annual data per municipality, with annual coefficients estimated as interaction effects. The proportion of military conscripts that met the minimum height requirement is the explained variable. Population density and milk supply are the explanatory variables. Our analysis adds to the existing literature on the urban penalty and premium by, first, explicitly focusing on differences over time as well as over space in the relation between urbanization and living standards; second, by using population density data, which is a continuous variable, instead of a simple urban-rural dichotomous variable; and third, by taking into account the importance of dairy farming. The results show that the effect of the availability of milk, the dairy premium, was significantly positive over the period 1850–1900, but remained relatively constant. The effect of population density, however, shows a clear temporality, transitioning from statistically significant negative (urban penalty) to statistically significant positive (urban premium) from 1877 onwards.
•Examines the effects of population density and local dairy farming on living standards in Fryslân, the Netherlands, 1850–1900.•Highlights the time and space dynamics of these effects.•Demonstrates a constant dairy premium.•Demonstrates a transition from urban penalty to urban premium from 1877.•Shows that improved health care became a dominant cause from the 1880s.
How Future-Proof are Dutch Cities? Van Steen, Paul J.M.; Pellenbarg, Piet H.; Groote, Peter D.
Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie,
12/2016, Volume:
107, Issue:
5
Journal Article
PDF
