I believe Davao City is on the right track creating a separate culture and arts office, instead of just integrating it within its tourism operations office. It is not a complete divorce, but for a partnership where each entity brings its core expertise to the table, avoiding fundamental conflicts of interest. Let us call it a “symbiotic separation.”
This concept is adapted from the field of developmental psychology, specifically from the work of Hungarian-born psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler in the 1960s.
Mahler used the terms “symbiosis” and “separation-individuation” to describe critical phases in infant psychological development. Symbiosis is the mother and child perceived as one during the early developmental phases and the separation is the necessary psychological process for forming a healthy individual identity.
Symbiotic separation is a powerful metaphor to adapt in the management of tourism and culture.
The ultimate goal in child development is for a child to achieve a stable sense of individuality while maintaining a healthy relationship with the mother. For tourism and cultural development, the goal is for sectors achieving effective collaboration while maintaining specialized, independent management.
The concept of symbiotic separation emphasizes two key aspects: maintaining independent management systems while establishing structured collaboration mechanisms.
First, let us clearly outline the core definitions and primary goals of each of the two entities.
The essence of culture is being the heart and soul of a place and its people. It is intrinsic, value-driven, and identity-forming. Its primary goal is expression, preservation, and development. It exists for its own sake — to create meaning, foster critical thought, document human experience, preserve heritage, and strengthen community identity and social cohesion.
The metrics of success for culture include artistic excellence, cultural vibrancy, community engagement, educational impact, preservation of heritage, and intellectual discourse. The stakeholders include artists, cultural practitioners, historians, archeologists, local communities, educational institutions, and funding bodies focused on cultural development.
On the other hand, the essence of tourism is being an economic and service sector that involves the movement of people to places outside their usual environment. Its primary goal is visitor satisfaction, economic generation, and destination competitiveness. It is extrinsic, market-driven, and experience-oriented.
The metrics of success for tourism include visitor numbers, length of stay, expenditure, job creation, foreign exchange earnings, and overall economic impact. The stakeholders are tour operators, hotels, airlines, travel agents, destination marketing organizations, and local businesses.
Based on their core definitions and primary goals, there are key differences in approach and priorities in terms of core drivers, time perspective (short-term versus long-term), audience focus, and measure of success.
Aside from that, the risks involved include commodification and dilution. The integrity of art or ritual can be lost if altered for tourist appeal while over-tourism can physically degrade cultural sites and disrupt local life which makes it unsustainable.
That is why culture and tourism should be managed as separate entities but in close collaboration. Let me illustrate some of the reasons why.
There is a need to protect the integrity of culture and arts. If a tourism office directly controls cultural assets, there is an inherent pressure to modify them for marketability. A sacred dance might be shortened for a show schedule to fit a tour itinerary; a delicate historical site might be kept open beyond its carrying capacity to reach revenue targets. So a dedicated culture and arts office acts as the guardian of authenticity and integrity, ensuring cultural development is not hostage to tourist numbers.
Cultural development and tourism promotion require different skills sets. Tourism management requires expertise in marketing, hospitality standards, transportation logistics, and international competition. A dedicated tourism office can focus on promoting the destination, improving visitor services, and developing tourism infrastructure without being conflicted by the non-commercial priorities of cultural preservation. It can just focus on marketing the cultural assets provided and curated by the cultural office without the burden of having to develop and preserve them, too.
When culture and tourism are managed as one entity, tourism’s powerful economic metrics (increase number of visitors by a certain percentage, for example) can easily overshadow the softer, more vital goals of culture (like restoration of an important cultural property). Separate budgets and reporting lines ensure that cultural funding is not solely justified by tourist revenue, allowing for important but non-lucrative projects to survive.
There is also a need to represent different stakeholder groups fairly. A cultural office is the advocate for artists, curators, and indigenous communities. A tourism office is the advocate for hoteliers, tour guides, and transport companies. Merging them often leads to the voice of industry overpowering the voice of culture. Separate entities ensure both perspectives are represented at both the policy and program implementation levels.
So the symbiotic separation is a good model. Two separate offices with distinct mandates, expertise, and accountability. But a mandatory and structured collaboration framework should be in place such as joint committees, public-private sector and multi-stakeholder councils, integrated planning for major festivals and cultural tourism sites. There must be clear agreements where culture sets the rules for authenticity and preservation while tourism leverages its expertise to bring respectful audiences and economic return that can, in part, be reinvested in culture.
This structure acknowledges that while tourism needs culture as a product, providing the “why to visit,” culture needs tourism as a partner for funding, visibility, and economic justification. However, by keeping management separate, we ensure culture is not reduced to merely a product, preserving its essential role in protecting the heart and soul of our community and in defining our identity.
Ultimately, symbiotic separation recognizes that culture is not tourism’s raw material, nor is tourism culture’s funding source. They are equal partners in a complex dance where sometimes leading, sometimes following, but always moving to the same rhythm of sustainable development.
