Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ROLE OF THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR IN TOURISM
SUPPLY
D.G.Pearce (1989) observed that the
provision of services and facilities characteristically involves a wide range
of agents of development. Some of these will be involved indirectly and
primarily with meeting the needs of tourists, a role that has fallen
predominantly to the private sector in most countries. …Other agents will
facilitate, control or limit development…through the provision of basic
infrastructure, planning or regulation. Such activities have commonly
been the responsibility of the public sector with the government at various
levels being charged with looking after the public's interest and providing
goods and services whose cost cannot be attributed directly to groups or
individuals.
(D.G.Pearce 1989:32)
Pearce's comments illustrate the essential distinction between the role of the private and
public sector in the provision of services and facilities for tourists that existed for much
of the twentieth century. However, the tendency to privatise and commercialise functions
that were once performed by government has been almost universal in western nations
since the late 1970s and has affected the nature of many national governments'
involvement in the tourism industry (Hall 1994). According to Hall and Jenkins (1995),
three principal reasons for this trend may be identified. Governments are interested in
• reducing the dependency of public enterprises on public budgets
• reducing public debt by selling state assets
• raising technical efficiencies by commercialisation.
This has meant that there has been a much greater blurring in the roles of the public and
private sectors with the development of enterprise boards, development corporations and
similar organisations. In such a political and economic climate the role of government in
tourism has undergone a dramatic shift from a traditional public administration model
which sought to implement government policy for a perceived public good, to a
corporatist model which emphasises efficiency, investment returns, the role of the
market, and relations with stakeholders, usually defined as industry. Corporatism, here, is
used in the sense of a dominant ideology in western society which claims rationality as its
central quality and which emphasises a notion of individualism in terms of self-interest
rather than the legitimacy of the individual citizen acting in the democratic interest of the
public good. However, in many policy areas including tourism, the changed role of the
state and the individual's relation to the state provides a major policy quandary. On the
one hand, there is the demand for less government interference in the market and
allowing industries to develop and trade without government subsidy or assistance while,
on the other, industry interest groups seek to have government policy developed in their
favour, including the maintenance of government funding for promotion as in the case of
