PREPARe: A Model to Aid the Development of Policies for Less Unsustainable Tourism in Historic Towns

Abstract

The PREPARe wheel is a dynamic model showing how a systematic environmental audit system could be applied to the development and management of tourism. The model was derived during research on four European historic walled towns characterised as destinations for heritage and urban tourism. Embracing the approach implied by Local Agenda 21 and ‘best value’ reviews, the paper illustrates how such towns can be assessed for levels of compliance with defined actions and policies set out as the necessary elements of an overall programme to move towards less unsustainable tourism in these destinations. This involves six successive stages: Policy, Responsibility, Eco-awareness, Programme, Audit and Review. Local stakeholders were involved at each stage, from defining objectives for tourism development locally to assessing the levels of compliance with expected policies and actions, although this brought a degree of subjectivity to the results. Turning the PREPARe wheel illustrates the continuous repetition of this process, which is necessary to stimulate ongoing improvements in levels of compliance with policies to move towards less unsustainable tourism. Developments in tourism policy in Alcúdia (one of the original study towns) since 1993 have been analysed to illustrate the process in practice.