Developing sustainable tourism, using a multicriteria analysis on renewable energy in Mediterranean Islands

Abstract

This work attempts to assess existing approaches to study the implementation of renewable energy technologies (RET) in specific islands in order to test if classification of islands is possible on the basis of renewable energy approach used, if there is a certain degree of correlation between renewable energy and sustainable tourism development, and if a path towards thematic tourism development might be opened through strategies and infrastructures based on renewable energy. Approaches of this kind have been attempted before, but frameworks used were either solely technical or not holistic in that they have not fully assessed the institutionalisation and governance aspects of RET penetration into island territories. Nevertheless, the authors consider that the strategic process of RET implementation can be effectively described in terms of institutional and strategic architecture. Therefore, in this paper we present a framework which assesses aspects of the institutional and governance aspects. In this framework, we first identify the strategic drivers for RET implementation and, then, we group islands according to these drivers. As a further step, we interpret and identify the dominant elements of the various RET integration strategies for these groups. The analysis shows that strategies related to RET implementation can be classified into four groups differing in motivation and present status of RET implementation. The next step links groups to the dominant type of tourism identified in each island. At this stage, the analysis has shown that our groupings are compatible with qualitative tourism features, in the sense that RET groups were associated with specific qualitative features of the tourism business. We were thus in a position to identify specific causalities between RET and tourism activity and to produce a conceptual diagram which shows graphically the linkage between RET and tourism when a specific political approach is undertaken. We thus came into a position to ascertain, for example, that “institutional” and “process” drivers function mainly at a local scale, whereas “competence” and “technology” drivers are mainly motivated by a wider scale (European or international). This suggests that RET implementation can follow different routes depending on existing tourism needs and choice of tourism policy. This is very useful for decision makers to know if they wish to position RET correctly as a driver for the creation of a new sustainable tourism market or (alternatively), as a support service for existing tourism development.