Abstract
In the UN Agenda 2030, tourism acquires a salient position as a critical sector, directly or indirectly influencing a number of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The pursuit of Sustainable Tourism (ST) is founded on the respectful exploitation of the sector’s core ‘raw material’, i.e., the precious and vulnerable nexus of natural and cultural heritage, and a cooperative multi-actor endeavor of all those having a stake in this shared good. Strategic tourism policy decisions, formulated at the state level, frame actors’ actions, favoring a balance among economic, societal and environmental goals; and a transparent, concrete and supportive investment landscape, allowing the tourism sector to blossom. But how successful are these policy decisions in promoting a sustainable, resilient and durable tourism model by instigating the entrepreneurial community to invest in the vibrant culture–tourism complex? An effort to respond to this concern is made in this work, grounded in the ‘Culture–Tourism–Policy’ triptych and their interaction, the ‘policy cycle’ as a means of assessing policy performance towards establishing a sustainable/resilient ‘marriage’ of ‘Culture–Tourism’, and GIS-enabled spatial data management for an evidence-based assessment of policy outcomes. These three factors are closely intertwined in the assessment of strategic tourism policy decisions’ performance in a culturally vibrant and highly reputed destination, Greece.
Highlights
Chon and Olsen [1] have previously highlighted the increasingly competitive, complex and rapidly changing tourism market environment as well as the openness and fragility of the tourism sector to alterations of the external world. These attributes have placed national, state and local policy makers, as well as market stakeholders, in a continuous struggle to: grasp signals of potential future changes; and use this knowledge in order to make smarter decisions with regard to efficient and competitive ways for steadily adjusting to emerging challenges. Such a struggle implies the need to explore key drivers of change of the external decision environment as well as the opportunities and threats these raise; and utilize them as a means of proposing strategic options and framing policy decisions in the tourism sector that are adjustable to external signals
Bearing in mind the: (i) abovementioned decisive key drivers, i.e., sustainability, climate change, significance attached to the natural–cultural nexus and current trends in consumer preferences, that largely characterize the evolving decision environment and the contemporary challenges that need to be dealt with by the tourism sector; and (ii) the noticeable trend for a cultural turn in this sector, the present paper aims at exploring the extent to which tourism and the natural–cultural nexus, i.e., two elements traditionally perceived as strongly interwoven by many, are firmly interrelated in the Greek scenery as a result of an enabling policy framework
Pursuant to the cartographic analysis of tourism entrepreneurship’s spatial distribution for every Greek region, as well as the results presented in Figure 5, the following remarks are made:
Summary
Chon and Olsen [1] have previously highlighted the increasingly competitive, complex and rapidly changing tourism market environment as well as the openness and fragility of the tourism sector to alterations of the external world. In an effort to respond to these research questions, the paper is structured as follows: in Section 2, the methodological approach, which is founded on the rationale of the policy cycle context, is briefly described; in Section 3, the spatial distribution of natural and cultural resources and tourism entrepreneurship in the Greek territory, based on big data collection and GIS-enabled data management and mapping, is presented; Section 4 elaborates on the Greek strategic policy framework, which demarcates the spatial choices and developmental role of tourism, in alignment with the sustainable exploitation of the natural and cultural nexus; Section 5 proceeds with a qualitative and data-driven assessment of the effectiveness of the previous mentioned framework in successfully establishing the culture–tourism complex as the ground upon which the future flourishing of the tourism sector in Greece can be pursued; Section 6 summarizes the obtained results and presents conclusions
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