AN ASSESSMENT OF COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE IN NETWORKING FOR CONTENTS TOURISM

The tourism industry has been recognised as a potential development mechanism in local communities facing various changes and challenges. In recent years, content tourism, which is the utilisation of lands associated with works appearing in subcultures and other content works for which Japan has attracted international attention, as a tourism resource. However, previous studies have not revealed much about the practice of contents tourism, especially those that examine it from the perspective of collaborative governance. This article presents a case study of a cross-sectoral organisational network designated to promote contents tourism in Sasebo, Nagasaki. This paper briefly introduces the topics of collaborative governance and contents tourism, and then the network for cross-sectoral collaboration and the research method. As a result, findings are discussed in terms of key elements of collaborative governance, aspects of the network formation and development process and features of the Sasebo’s context that may influence the network development. In conclusion, this paper focuses on the role of key stakeholders in formatting a network in the context of content tourism. The struggle to formulate a collaborative governance approach for effective content tourism may bring positive socio-economic benefits to the city and similar declining cities in Japan. As this approach is conceptually tentative and in its developmental stage in theory and practice, it needs to be complemented by additional research findings from empirical case studies conducted with broader and more diverse stakeholder involvement.