Politics, policy and regional tourism administration: a case examination of Scottish area tourist board funding

The issue of Area Tourist Board (ATB) funding in Scotland has been of growi ng importance since 1996, when the Government empowered a reduction in the number of such Boards from 32 to 14, While much of the controversy surround ing this reduction in the number of Boards has centred an issues of the dis charge of responsibilities, questions of ATB funding have recently been bro ught to the fore because of financial difficulties faced by several ATBs. T his paper explores questions of ATB funding, beginning with an overview of Scotland's tourism administrative structure before proceeding to examine pe rceived difficulties with the role, structure and funding arrangements for the ATBs in the context of current debates to resolve these. With the ultim ate objective of evaluating the most commonly propounded resolutions to the ATB funding problem, the paper describes and analyses opportunities for, a nd obstacles to long-term change, conluding that a possible palliative is a centralized funding mechanism tempered by safeguards to local accountabili ty and the delivery of tourism services. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.