South Wales hosts European visitors as COLLABOR8 Project Kicks Off

Globalisation creates homogenous businesses often unconnected with a region’s locality or cultural identity. You can see it increasingly in our city and town centres – everywhere is in danger of becoming the same as everywhere else.. Writes Nick Stewart.

Waking up in a chain hotel, eating in a chain restaurant or wandering through your average modern shopping precinct, you’d be hard-pressed to identify whether you were in Brighton or Brussells. In an economic term known as ‘leakage’, businesses owned by foreign interests cause money spent to literally leak out the local economy into the hands of outside ownership, not dissimilar to pouring water into a hole-ridden bucket. Local businesses, artisans and entrepreneurs are undermined becoming disempowered as they lose control over their own livelihoods.

Trade liberalisation and deregulation, the two planks of globalisation are the culprits. In these times of economic depression, these issues are especially pertinent. Rural areas, in particular, face economic hardship with declining populations and disappearing traditional landscapes. This requires careful economic restructuring to strengthen their economies and protect their landscapes, cultural identity and traditions.

Why does all this matter? Responsible and sustainable tourism is all about diversity; natural and cultural – a celebration of what makes us different not identical! The proliferation of sameness threatens both host communities in a destination and an enjoyable, sustainable visitor experience. A responsible approach to tourism and local economic development makes better places for people to live, and for people to visit. A place’s uniqueness is a potential asset for enterprises to develop distinct products and services that really reflect the characteristics of the local area in which they are produced. Europe has a unique selling point: its cultural diversity and heritage.

Last week a new and exciting European project to tackle these very issues called ‘Collabor8’ got underway with a week-long inaugural ceremony. Collabor8 is a transnational European project – 50% funded by the ERDF Interreg IVB NEW Programme – that aims to contribute to the economic prosperity, sustainability and cultural identity of North West Europe. This will be done by forming and supporting new clusters of local businesses in the cultural, creative, countryside, recreation, local-food and hospitality sectors. The concept of ‘sense of place’ – what makes places unique and distinctive and therefore attractive to visitors will be used as a powerful device to bring about sustainable development.

The nine European Partners that includes four UK partners as well as those from Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands met in South Wales to begin to work together to share ideas and experiences. Local entrepreneurs from each region were also invited to learn about how local businesses can benefit from Collabor8 and to exchange information.

“The spirit of cluster development is in marketing your neighbour as well as you market yourself” said guest speaker Matt Drew, Chief Executive of the Midlands Meander, sharing the success story of how enterprises working together have created a rural destination that rivals the wine routes of the Cape in South Africa.

Cooperation and not all out competition seems to be the key and it also appears that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts: “Collabor8 is about both businesses and public bodies working together effectively to achieve something greater than we could all acting individually” said Richard Tyler, Sustainable Tourism Manager for Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, one of the nine Collabor8 partners. “In the Brecon Beacons, we will be concentrating on implementing sustainable tourism and will be supporting clusters with a programme of capacity building, eco-accreditation, new product development and sense of place training with budgets available for implementation”.

by Nick Stewart