Collaborative Partnerships between Public and Private Stakeholders in SustainableDestinations : A case study of Uppsala, Sweden

Sammanfattning: Tourism destinations are implementing policies based on global sustainability agreements. Countries are taking different approaches to fulfilling their sustainability goals. Collaboration was considered an important ingredient to implementing policies and achieving targets. The city of Uppsala in Sweden has been awarded most sustainable city and recognized for its collaboration efforts. In this study I evaluated the collaboration both within public and private organisations. The research was designed as an inductive and qualitative case study. Data was collected by interviewing 12 organisations and analyzing 7 documents. To evaluate the intra- organisational relationship of the municipality, documents were analysed. Timeline of policy development and implementation was compared to Gary’s Collaboration theory (1989) and Selin’s Strategic Bridging (1995). Results indicate that Uppsala’s municipal government (MO) has successfully developed sustainability policies with strong collaboration. This is especially the case intra-organisation. However, most of these partnerships were collaborative in nature with larger organisations. Smaller businesses with more direct contact with the tourists are not having their problems effectively addressed. This was the case with marketing material and information sites. This leads us to believe that Uppsala has the common characteristics of trust, commitment and communication with the larger players in tourism; but not the smaller ones. Furthermore, this study indicates that collaboration efforts are more different in cities; factors such as resources availability and economic contribution of organisations affect the strength of the partnership.