Place Branding as Participatory Governance? An Interdisciplinary Case Study of Tasmania, Australia
Author(s)
Gonzalez, Laura Ripoll
Gale, Fred
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2020
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Research in both public administration and place development has identified a need to develop more participatory approaches to governing cities and regions. Scholars have identified place branding as one of several potential policy instruments to enable more participatory place development. Recently, academics working in diverse disciplines, including political studies, public administration, and regional development have suggested that an alternative, bottom-up, more participatory approach to place branding could be employed. Such an interdisciplinary approach would use iterative communication exchanges within a network of ...
View more >Research in both public administration and place development has identified a need to develop more participatory approaches to governing cities and regions. Scholars have identified place branding as one of several potential policy instruments to enable more participatory place development. Recently, academics working in diverse disciplines, including political studies, public administration, and regional development have suggested that an alternative, bottom-up, more participatory approach to place branding could be employed. Such an interdisciplinary approach would use iterative communication exchanges within a network of diverse stakeholders including residents to better foster stakeholder participation, contribute to sustainable development, and deliver substantive social justice and increased citizen satisfaction. Building on this research and using an exploratory, qualitative, case-study methodology, our aim was to observe and analyze such interactions and communicative exchanges in practice. Drawing on the experience of the Australian state of Tasmania, we studied stakeholder reactions to the participatory place branding approach. We found that although participants were initially skeptical and identified many barriers to implementing participatory place branding, they simultaneously became excited by its possibilities and able to identify how many of the barriers could be transcended.
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View more >Research in both public administration and place development has identified a need to develop more participatory approaches to governing cities and regions. Scholars have identified place branding as one of several potential policy instruments to enable more participatory place development. Recently, academics working in diverse disciplines, including political studies, public administration, and regional development have suggested that an alternative, bottom-up, more participatory approach to place branding could be employed. Such an interdisciplinary approach would use iterative communication exchanges within a network of diverse stakeholders including residents to better foster stakeholder participation, contribute to sustainable development, and deliver substantive social justice and increased citizen satisfaction. Building on this research and using an exploratory, qualitative, case-study methodology, our aim was to observe and analyze such interactions and communicative exchanges in practice. Drawing on the experience of the Australian state of Tasmania, we studied stakeholder reactions to the participatory place branding approach. We found that although participants were initially skeptical and identified many barriers to implementing participatory place branding, they simultaneously became excited by its possibilities and able to identify how many of the barriers could be transcended.
View less >
Journal Title
Sage Open
Volume
10
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of
the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages
(https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Subject
Curriculum and Pedagogy
Sociology
Other Studies in Human Society
Social Sciences
Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
participatory governance
place branding