Collaborative approach for tourism conflict management: A Portuguese case study

Land use planning and tourism development perspectives often lead to the emergence of conflicts and, it is fairly common that the final results are not satisfactory to anyone. Although the collaborative approach seems to be a good strategy to manage those conflicts, there are some important barriers that prevent the effective application of this method. This paper, resulting from a larger research, focuses on the analysis of the viability of a collaborative approach to managing conflicts between tourism development and the land use and natural values conservation (the tourism versus territory conflicts). Two research questions are presented: (R1) What are the barriers hampering the development of a collaborative approach to manage the tourism vs. territory conflicts? and (R2) How to collaboratively manage conflicts between tourism and territory? A case study is presented: the Troia-Melides Coast (Portugal), a coastal area, with high natural value, currently under pressure from urban and touristic developers. Over the course of the study, a face-to-face interview was conducted with 26 stakeholders. Proceeding from the theoretical background on collaboration barriers and collaborative models, the conditions to collaboratively manage the tourism vs. territory conflict in the Portuguese context are identified. It can be concluded that the key-factors in the development of a collaborative approach to conflict management in this case of situations are: the collaboration process preparation, communication, trust building, empowerment and the collaborative leadership.