Stakeholders’ Participation in Sustainable Tourism Planning for a Rural Region: Extremadura Case Study (Spain)

Marcelo Sánchez-Oro Sánchez,José Castro-Serrano,Rafael Robina-Ramírez

doi:10.3390/land10060553

Marcelo Sánchez-Oro Sánchez, José Castro-Serrano + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/land10060553

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Journal: Land	Publication Date: May 24, 2021
Citations: 15	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Extremadura

Abstract

The objective of this research is to obtain and analyze discursive information on the problems and solutions of the tourism sector in an eminently rural region, such as Extremadura, based on the opinions of stakeholders, in order to incorporate them into the evaluation and tourism planning of the region. More specifically, on the situation of the sector, perceptions on profitability and return on investment, the problem of overnight stays, and coordination between tourism agents and training demands, in order to make a sustainable tourism sector in a rural region. The research starts from the following premise: for tourism to be sustainable, stakeholders must participate in the strategic decision-making process. This paper aims, on the one hand, to clarify sufficiently the state of the art regarding the validity of focus groups and their analysis as a research methodology, explaining how to address the main challenges implied by this technique by reviewing a selection of research works that we consider relevant in this field. On the other hand, an analysis of the tourism sector in Extremadura is carried out based on these group dynamics. The main result, after analyzing the discourse of six focus groups, is that the different opinions of their members reveal, despite everything, that the training of human capital in the tourism sector in rural environments is a pending issue.

Highlights

The objective of the focus group research is to obtain discursive information on the problems and solutions of the regional tourism sector [7] from stakeholders in order to incorporate them into the evaluation and tourism planning of the region
The “relationship tree” shows the links that we discovered between the questions posed by the moderators in the propositions we formulated in Table 2 and the responses obtained. This initial phase, for all the focus groups, makes it possible to observe the structure of the links between the different issues under discussion
The analysis of the discourse of the six focus groups led to a series of conclusions that, in general, are congruent with other sources of data, such as the standardized surveys of businesspeople and the semi-directive interviews that we conducted with an important group of socio-economic actors in the sector

Summary

Introduction

Fiske, entitled The Focused Interview [2], is one of the first references in this field, and serves as a starting point for the use of these group dynamics in the sociological study of different problems [1]

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion