Policy and Regulatory Challenges in the Tourism Collaborative Economy

The choice of policy approach and regulatory framework in dealing with the collaborative economy rests on two fundamental factors—that government decisions should be based on good sound knowledge and that this knowledge should be above politics. In the newly emerging and rapidly growing collaborative economy, these conditions are difficult to meet. The dynamic restructuring of power relations, new stakeholders and information asymmetries can obscure what is really going on. Some authors offer valuable meso-level explorations of policy and regulatory issues in different sub-sectors of the collaborative economy. However, these solutions are often based on assumptions about government sovereignty and power relations that do not necessarily apply in the slippery global world of platform capitalism. This chapter seeks to undertake a critical exploration of the factors and values that permeate and circulate in policy discussions about the collaborative economy at a macro-level. The rendering of the socio-political landscape as complex, dynamic and value-laden dictates that policy approaches and regulatory solutions are subjective and influenced by prevailing ideology, available knowledge and the path dependencies created from historical events and approaches. These influences have a crucial role to play on the identification of alternative regulatory solutions, the evaluation of these alternatives, and the adoption of preferred approaches.