Abstract:
Bougainville is an autonomous region within the nation of Papua New Guinea that is in search of new economic development initiatives to bring its people forward and united from a civil war that officially ceased in 1997. Tourism has been one economic development strategy that has been introduced to assist in stimulating the local economy hoping to ultimately provide human development gains for the people of Bougainville. The main strategy for tourism’s development is through the concept of ecotourism which concentrates on nature and cultural attractions while operating within a sustainable framework. However the issue of reopening the Panguna Mine has been advocated by some members of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville Government as the only realistic way forward if Bougainville is to achieve independence. Even though the conditions of any future mining agreement would be vastly different from the previous agreement; the spectre of conflict would likely continue to lie over the region. Low impact tourism could be seen as a viable alternative to the resumption of mining even though the gains would take much longer to materialise, the risks of future conflict would be drastically reduced. This research explores tourism development in Bougainville within the framework of a destination branding concept referred to as post-conflict tourism. Its aim is to provide an “add-on” marking tool to differentiate “Destination Bougainville” from the huge array of ecotourism initiatives utilised by many other destinations. This is viewed from the perception of the international tourist to Bougainville combined with international cases of how tourism has been developed in other post-conflict destinations. This is an exploratory study that looks at the issues from the outside-in, analysing issues of perceptions and motivations of a tourist visiting a destination that could still be considered to be in a period of post-conflict recovery. This is achieved through a web-based survey directed at Bougainville travellers and three case studies which investigates the positive and negative aspects of tourism development in a post-conflict context, and how these lessons could be applied to Bougainville’s own context.
