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The Republic of Mauritius is an island of about 1,860 square kilometres and is located in the Indian Ocean. Mauritius only became independent in 1968; however, local administration existed about two centuries earlier. As per the ‘Report on Local Government for 1962’ (No. 30 of 1963,Colony of Mauritius, Government Printing, Mauritius), “Local government can be traced back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when Mauritius was a French possession”. The ‘Pamplemousses/Riviere-du-Rempart’ District Council is one of the nine local authorities of the island. This region has been specially selected as most of the major resorts are located here. It is also an area which has undergone dramatic change, an ever increasing volume of tourist activities, in the last past two decades. Governance can be considered as a countrywide approach to communal life. “Governance implies a concern with both internal power relations of the governmental system and the wider distribution of power held by external societal interests” (Stoker 1996, pp195). “Local governance is a term which seeks to capture the shift away from a system in which local authorities were the key actors in their localities to one where decision-making authority and service provision is shared among a range of agencies” (Lawrence, P., Wilson D., 1996. pp 3).Local governance also considers other issues like poverty, economic renewal, unemployment, environmental decay & crime” (Stoker 1996,pp 203). How is the concept of sustainability linked or can be linked to local governance? To what extent can local community involvement help in implementing sustainable tourism development strategies? These two questions form the core of this research paper. This is a ‘practice-focus’ case-study of the ‘Pamplemousses/Riviere-du-Rempart’ Districts in Mauritius.

Stream: Cultural Sustainability

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Raj Chintaram holds an MSc in Public Sector Management and is a full time research student at UTM. He is also a member of numerous local and international NGOs and a respected authority in the civil society. He has also been working extensively on local government in Mauritius.Raj has long been associated with poverty alleviation , environmental and ecological programmes and this motivates his inclination towards issues related to sustainable development

Needesh Ramphul is a Lecturer at the School of Public Sector Policy and Management where he lectures Organisation and Management, Performance Management and Human Resource Management. He joined the University in January 2005 and has a particular interest in field of Management, Management Development and Benchmarking. Needesh has a lot of working

experience given that after the completion of his undergraduate degree in Management, he has worked as trainee manager/unit manager at CMT Ltee for five years. He also completed his MBA with specialization in Human Resource Management at the University Of Mauritius.