CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Hajdinjak, Sanja |
|---|---|
| Title | When Bureaucrats Constrain the Grabbing Hand: Environmental Resource Sustainability in Tourism |
| Summary | International organizations, donors and politicians advocate tourism as a key developmental strategy that can ensure poverty relief and economic growth. However, tourism development frequently leads to vast resource degradation as countries struggle to balance demands for growth and sustainability. This dissertation researches why some countries successfully prevent rent-grabbing and ensure environmental resource sustainability, while others waste natural resources by allowing colluding political and business elites to capitalize on significant resource windfalls. Applying resource curse theory to the tourism sector and drawing on the tourism, corruption and veto points bodies of literature, I develop a theoretical framework focused on bureaucratic and political veto points (BVP and PVP). I argue that bureaucratic veto points, including bureaucratic expertise, decentralized spatial planning and stringent environmental legislation, provide protection against rent-grabbing and resource misuse. In addition, vertical political cohabitation, turnover in power and an independent judiciary act as political vetos against resource use pathologies. Finally, civil society and the media act as catalysts in ensuring public and judiciary engagement by requiring assessment of legality. The framework is tested empirically using a mixed methods approach. I analyse the role of BVPs and PVPs cross-nationally on a large-N sample of 127 economies using instrumental variables, principal component analysis and graphical modelling. Qualitatively, I engage in a comparative case analysis of the two most similar cases, Croatia and Montenegro. While they share tourism dependence and a common Yugoslav heritage, Croatia was more successful in preventing tourism rent-grabbing which in Montenegro resulted in widespread resource devastation. The qualitative analysis has two levels. First, I trace historically the coevolution of political institutions, bureaucracy and economic development across four periods and argue that bureaucratic expertise and capacity are partially exogenous from politics. Secondly, based on original data – Tourism Projects Dataset – I analyse the role of the BVPs and PVPs in Croatia and Montenegro, both on aggregate and tourism project level. This mixed methods approach confirms that bureaucratic and political veto points explain variation in the rent-grabbing and resource management in the tourism sector. |
| Supervisor | Corduneanu-Huci, Cristina |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/hajdinjak_sanja.pdf |
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