Proposed Social Network Analysis of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council in Central America

Overview: Central America, while a diverse group of countries with strong national identities and distinct indigenous groups, is tied together by some overarching environmental, socioeconomic and cultural similarities that can serve as a basis for cohesion between nations in the region. As tourism becomes an increasingly important economic enterprise to Central American countries, alliances like the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) have increased their presence in the area to try and shape the future of tourism in the region. While GSTC members are committed to a similar goal, the lack of communication between companies obscures possible synergies that could exist between members and improve their mutual success in the region.

Question: How can a social network analysis (SNA) of the members within the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) who currently work on community development projects in Central America help improve collaborative synergies between companies to take advantage of each organizations unique skill set and expertise?

Hypothesis: By understanding the expertise of members within in GSTC working on similar projects in close geographical proximity to one another, we can help form mutually beneficial collaborative efforts to better achieve the Council objective of “mainstreaming sustainable tourism” in Central America. (www.gstcouncil.org)

Method: To compile the data, circulating a short survey would suffice, or alternatively attempt to use a web crawler to aggregate data based on the following subjects. For the purposes of brevity and consistency, we will limit ourselves to private sector companies focused on community development projects.

Distribution: The survey will be distributed to the project coordinator and/or the business development coordinator; ideally these individuals will have working knowledge of the projects their organization is undertaking throughout Central America.

Survey: The data will be compiled in two individual sets: Part I is focused on organizational attributes of the company and communication patterns with other council members. Part II concentrates on compiling relevant information about individual projects to be linked under individual nodes.

PART I:

Organizational Size:

Employee size: (10-20), (20-30) (30-40) (40-50) (50+)

Areas of Expertise:

Tourism operations

Educational

Certification Program

Conservation

Wildlife preservation

Business Development

Forest Management

Community Development

Archeology

Patterns of Communication:

Which of these organizations have you communicated directly within the last year?

There follows a list of twenty or so organizations targeted within the GSTC based on operations in community development in Central America. The list would measure communication as follows:

( ) Never ( ) Occasionally ( ) Frequently

PART II:

The second step is to define individual project attributes to tease out similar efforts that may lead to overlap. For the survey, each company would fill out three to five possible nodes (representing individual projects); this would be set in five columns with project focus and country to be ticked consecutively resulting in one node)

Node Attribute Data set:

Community Development Attributes:

Agricultural tourism

Adventure tourism

Archeological element

Lodging

Food

Ecolodges

Ocean and Beach/Aquatic Tourism

Educational Attraction

Educational Services

Educational Tourism

Voluntourism

Scientific

Locations:

Mexico

Guatemala

Honduras

Nicaragua

Costa Rica

Panama

Selling the survey idea to GSTC: We hope to entice the GSTC to participate in our survey by explaining it could be used to increase members’ professional network and facilitate knowledge sharing across the region and within the sector.

The primary value of the survey for the GSTC is not in quantifying the density of the network or focusing simply on identifying connections, but rather highlighting members who aren’t connected but should be based on expertise and similar project involvement. While competition between some members of the GSTC will exclude their desire to directly participate with one another, many companies simply might not know the resources they have available to them under the auspices of the GSTC. Ideally, we would identify these companies to facilitate a transfer of best practices that have historically worked for them in a particular area. We hope to uncover potential benefits that could be realized by shared expertise and increased collaboration to make the GSTC more effective in mainstreaming sustainable tourism in the region.