ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, the expansion of tourism in developing countries has generated a considerable amount of attention, debate and interest. Much research has focused on the diverse impacts which the growth of international tourism in developing countries has brought about (see Chapters 13 and 14) and on the way in which this development has occurred. Particular attention has been given to two usually divergent and sometimes conflicting sets of actors: multinational corporations and indigenous local participants (e.g. Smith and Eadington 1992; Pearce 1995). The emphasis has been on the private rather than the public sector. Research on government involvement has largely focused on tourism and public policy rather than on the agencies through which such policy has been formulated and implemented (Jenkins and Henry 1982; Pearce 1989; Holder 1992). This reflects a wider pattern of neglect as it is only in the 1990s that tourist organizations per se have been subjected to systematic scrutiny and analysis by researchers (Pearce 1992; Choy 1993). Choy considered the top five Asia-Pacific destinations, but the majority of the research in this field so far has been concerned with the role and structure of tourist organizations in developed Western economies, leaving those in developing countries essentially unexplored. A recent review of tourism in the South Pacific showed, for example, that while national and other tourist organizations in Australia and New Zealand were attracting increased attention, with the exception of Sofield’s (1991) examination of the organizational aspects of the naghol in Vanuatu, little comparable institutional research appears to have been carried out yet in the Pacific islands (Pearce 1995).
