STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION IN MONTENEGRIN TOURISM DESTINATIONS – CURRENT STATE AND CONSTRAINTS

Abstract

For the sustainable development of tourism destinations, there is a need for a coordinated effort between all interest groups (tourism stakeholders from the public, private and civil sectors) through systematically developed and implemented management plans at all levels, especially at the local destination level, where tourism activities take place, tourists interact with service providers and with communities, and where tourism’s positive and negative impacts are most felt. The paper deals with the problem of managing a tourism destination from the perspective of harmonizing stakeholders’ interests. It explores destination management in the Montenegrin tourism destinations, namely the level of stakeholders’ cooperation at the local destination level. An empirical research was carried out on the sample of 19 local tourist organizations in Montenegro. The findings and implications of the research are given in the paper. Based on the stakeholder theory, the research tries to verify that the level of destination management development depends on the level of stakeholder's cooperation. The results revealed that cooperation between the many and varied tourism stakeholders in the Montenegrin tourism destinations is not yet sufficiently developed, as they face a number of issues such as the lack of planning documents, insufficiently developed communication channels and variety of often opposing interests. Nevertheless, there are indications based on the recently conducted research reported in this paper, that there is a strong positive correlation between the level of stakeholder's cooperation and the state of destination tourism planning, marketing activities, monitoring and continuous education.