Abstract
The main tourist destinations in Aotearoa / New Zealand include nature-based destinations and rural regions that are highly exposed to disaster risk and limited in emergency response resources and medical care capacities. Close collaboration between emergency management and tourism organisations is required. Tourism stakeholders can offer expertise and resources to aid emergency management, while emergency agencies can provide training and support to enhance tourism organisations’ emergency preparedness. Despite the importance of collaborative networks in responding to tourism disasters, it remains unclear how they are designed and function, how they form and change during emergencies, and what contributes to their effectiveness and sustainability. Understanding this is critical to help destinations to be better prepared for future disaster events.
This study addresses these gaps by adopting a sequential exploratory mixed-methods social network approach, incorporating the quantitative analysis of survey responses and the qualitative analysis of interviews with key stakeholders from two major nature-based destinations in New Zealand, Piopiotahi / Milford Sound and Tāhuna / Queenstown. Qualitative and quantitative methods are used consecutively, with interviews providing insights that inform the development of the survey instrument. Descriptive Social Network Analysis is used to explore network connectivity and structure at the whole level, assess tie strength and quality with multiplexity, identify communities through modularity analysis at the intermediate level, and highlight key actors using centrality measures at the local level. Inferential Social Network Analysis is employed to analyse interdependencies between collaborative types to understand what drives collaboration during disaster response. Thematic Analysis provides insights into stakeholders’ understanding and motivations for collaboration, their collaboration practices, strategies for facilitating and maintaining relationships, and explains and contextualizes quantitative results.
Results provide insights into the nature of collaboration in tourism disaster management, and how collaborative relations are enacted in practice. Five types of collaborative relations are identified: acquaintance, communication, resource sharing, business relations, and formal agreements. New empirical evidence is provided on the structural characteristics of TDM networks, including how these properties change from preparedness to response and how they can influence network effectiveness. The findings indicate that Milford Sound and Queenstown networks have a dense, core-periphery structure, where Emergency Management Organisations and Regional Tourism Organisations play a key role as central and brokering actors. Key structural changes include reduced connections and a more distinct core-periphery structure, indicating increased peripheral actor engagement during response. Communication, formal agreements, and business relations have a significant and positive effect on response collaboration, highlighting the importance of cultivating diverse connections and involving tourism stakeholders in disaster planning. Moreover, the study introduces the concept of “network sustainability” in the tourism disaster management literature and proposes strategies for maintaining connections in the absence of disasters.
Overall, this study highlights the significant role of tourism stakeholders alongside emergency management organisations in disaster management, particularly in intelligence, welfare, and logistics. Establishing and maintaining effective collaborative networks in tourism disaster management is crucial for improving disaster preparedness and response. To address this need, the study introduces a conceptual framework that serves as a guide for stakeholders to develop, optimise, and sustain networks. By integrating concepts and tools from social network studies in emergency management with insights from tourism, this research expands the traditional focus beyond tourism alone. The enhanced understanding of collaboration between tourism and emergency management organisations demonstrates the effectiveness of Social Network Analysis as a tool for investigating collaborative networks in tourism disaster management.