COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE FOR SUSTAINABLE HERITAGE TOURISM: EVIDENCE FROM SELAPARANG CEMETERY, INDONESIA

Abstrak

Cultural heritage sites in Indonesia are increasingly expected to function simultaneously as objects of conservation and as tourism destinations, a dual role that no single government agency can manage alone. This article examines how collaborative governance theory explains, and can be extended by, the case of the Selaparang royal cemetery in East Lombok, a heritage and pilgrimage site linked to the oldest Islamic kingdom on the island. The study combines a systematic literature review of twenty-one Scopus-indexed publications on collaborative governance, heritage tourism, and sustainable tourism with a documentary case analysis of Selaparang built from the only identified empirical account of the site's tourism governance, Pattaray and Ratmaja (2026), together with the relevant Indonesian legal and policy instruments. No new interviews, surveys, or site observations were conducted for this article; the case analysis is a secondary, documentary synthesis, and this boundary is stated explicitly in the Method and Limitations sections. The literature review identifies three recurring dimensions, institutional collaboration, community empowerment, and heritage value preservation, that structure how collaborative governance is discussed in heritage tourism research generally and that also organize what is reported about Selaparang specifically, alongside a fourth cross-cutting concern, environmental and socio-cultural sustainability, drawn from the UNWTO's three-pillar sustainable tourism framework. Read together with Ansell and Gash's (2008) five collaborative governance elements and Moore's (1995) public value framework, these dimensions are synthesized into a Collaborative Heritage Tourism Governance Model (CHTGM), which positions heritage tourism as an ongoing collaborative governance ecosystem rather than a conservation project or a tourism development project considered separately. Applied to Selaparang, the model suggests that the site's current governance rests substantially on informal community stewardship and customary leadership, with formal inter-agency coordination between the Tourism Office and the Cultural Heritage Preservation Center still comparatively thin, while community empowerment and heritage value preservation are, on the documentary evidence available, comparatively well established. The article offers policymakers a vocabulary and a structure for thinking about heritage tourism governance at comparable sites, while being explicit about what a documentary, single-case study of this kind can and cannot establish.