The The effects of tourism can strain or ease development

A tale of three stakeholder groups in the Vhembe district (South Africa)

Resumo

Collaboration between different stakeholders in the tourism industry is widely advocated but, in many cases, it is a challenge which might be the very factor that hampers development. The reasons for collaboration, supports the sustainable management of the industry, bringing together the community and the public – and private sectors however, the success rate over the last 20 years in South Africa is limited. As a possible reason for unsuccessful collaboration efforts, this study explores the roles and expectations of three stakeholder groups in developing the tourism sector. A mixed-methods approach was applied, to collect data from residents, tourism businesses and local government employees in the Vhembe district. Due to the unavailability of detailed residential and business information in this district, convenience sampling was applied for the quantitative research (self-structured questionnaires), resulting in 520 residents and 100 tourism businesses participating. Purposive sampling was used for the qualitative research resulting in 30 municipality employees surveyed through semi-structured interviews. It was clear from the results that collaboration is important to all the stakeholders, which supports previous studies. It was also found that the three stakeholder groups have different perceptions of the effects of tourism development, which contributes to slow development. It is recommended that more should be done to integrate the expectations of all stakeholders and different stakeholder groups to form a collaborative group to speak on behalf of the different stakeholders and develop an integrated plan with buy-in and role clarification of all stakeholders. Added to that, the expectations should be determined before tourism development can happen to resolve issues before venturing into development. One of the major drawbacks of tourism development, in many cases, is the lack of a coordinated and integrated effort.