Doctoral Dissertation Research: Community Engagement and Land-Use Regulation

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The goal of this project is to identify the social processes through which communities exert leverage over urban development and the construction of tourism destinations. It specifically investigates how local residents engage with land-use regulations and assert distinctive cultural frameworks in efforts to exercise their interests. The research employs qualitative case studies of three contested tourism-development sites in the state of Hawaii in which community members successfully halted or slowed projects, or obtained significant concessions from developers. For analytical contrast, a fourth site will be examined in which community efforts to influence the development of a large coastal resort complex were largely unsuccessful. Data will be gathered from public records, newspapers, personal interviews, and existing video footage. The primacy of tourism-driven urbanization in Hawaii makes it a useful case for generating theory. Hawaii's unusually dense and robust land-use regulatory system also make it an important study site for revealing the social struggles surrounding urban growth regulation. Finally, this project aims to bring concepts from cultural sociology to bear on debates at the intersection of urban politics and urban sociology. This research will generate several broader impacts, including providing an empirical basis to inform policy debates in Hawaii and beyond through the first systematic investigation of Hawaii's unique land-use regulatory system since 1980. Results will be shared with multi-disciplinary audiences through conference presentations, community group meetings, and direct distribution of chapters to community leaders and public officials. This project will help community organizers, researchers, and policy-makers better understand the stakes and social struggles involved in tourism and urban development. Research results may also provide practical lessons to planners and public officials about how to incorporate community concerns into tourism-development.