Destination Management Organizations as Metagovernors: Governance of Governance or Government of Governance?

Destinations are characterized by coping with complex relations of reciprocal interdependence between public, semipublic and private actors and their differing logics of action. Processes of destination governance include the emergence of new institutional arrangement and regulation structures integrating different logics of steering. But finally, a single actor is never be able to control and steer all other actors, who “make” the destination. Destinations cannot be managed like enterprises. This is also true for destination management organizations (DMO), who perceive themselves as focal institutions in destination networks or as metagovernors.
For analyzing the role of metagovernors in destination governance processes I will refer to Kooiman’s conceptualization of orders of governance. Hence, metagovernance serves as a normative frame for destination governance and limits the practices of problem solving and creating opportunities in first-order governance and the institutional settings of second-order governance. In general, literature on governance refers to the need of an organizational core or rather a management of governance processes, which is not based upon some kind of elitist action because the possibility of establishing an all-embracing center of supervision has to be denied. A DMO can interpret the role of a destination metagovernor in different ways, depending on her self-concept. The contribution focuses on issues of a DMO’s understanding of metagovernance as a government of governance, which means the DMO acts as a goal-oriented actor with an own agenda, in contrast to a DMO’s understanding of metagovernance as a self-reflexive governance of governance, as a facilitator and unprejudiced guardian of the organization of self-organization. Using examples of so-called hands-off- and hands-on-metagovernance it should be illustrated how their individual arrangement allows a DMO as metagovernor different access facilities to the development of the destination.