The Contribution of Sports Tourism to Sustainable Development Based on Sustainable Development Indicators – The Case of Greece

Abstract

Development in the sense of growth under pure economic perspective is now considered outdated and anachronistic. In recent years, if not decades, development is only meant to be sustainable. This is due to the fact that if it does not become sustainable it will soon cease to exist. In this regard, there have been attempts to measure development and sustainability mainly by the United Nations but also by many scholars. This process resulted in the construction of 50 main and 46 secondary indicators for sustainable development in 2007, which differ from the indicators that determine the percentage of achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as set in 2015. In this paper, an attempt is made to categorize the 96 Sustainable Development indicators of the U.N. according to Maslow's pyramid of needs and Bossel's indicator categories. This combination forms the pyramid of sustainable development in which the individual indicators are distributed. The purpose of this categorization is to investigate the contribution of sports tourism to sustainable development based on the individual indicators as well as its extent within the categories of the pyramid. Schematically, the pyramid helps to visualize the contribution of sport and tourism to sustainable development.