Benefits of policy actor embeddedness for sustainable tourism indicators’ design: the case of Andalusia

Abstract

To ensure effective management, tourism governments need tools that can measure tourism activities’ impacts on sustainable development. Systems of indicators are thus widely used in tourism sustainability management and need to find a balance between academic and professional perspectives. This research is a case study focused on a tool for monitoring regional government policies: the Andalusia System of Sustainable Tourism Development Indicators (SISTA). The system was developed by an interdisciplinary group of 15 experts from within the regional government and academia. We apply the institutional theory in the tourism public sector to study a process of deinstitutionalization to get insights on how actors within tourism management organizations can shape institutions. Our results demonstrate that policy actors’ participation enhances these systems’ usefulness, introducing the sustainability policy paradigm and raising awareness of the strategic uses of data to support policy decisions. On the other hand, challenges of policy actors’ participation are related to the mismatch between sustainability evolution and policy cycles, and from the difficulty of judging policy measures’ efficiency. This research will serve as a reference for other tourism destinations working on measuring system development with practical applications as well as for academia to integrate policy actors’ needs into theoretical approaches.