Second policy report

This report serves as deliverable D1.3 of the SmartCulTour Horizon 2020 project (grant agreement number 870708) which is aimed at supporting regional development in all European regions with important tangible and intangible cultural assets, including those located in rural peripheries and the urban fringe, through sustainable cultural tourism. This report aims to provide an overview of the specific policy recommendations that originate from two particular tasks in the SmartCulTour project: conceptualization, indicator selection, and measurement of composite indices in order to assess the state of the destination with regard to (cultural tourism) sustainability and resilience (WP4) and development of decision-support systems to assist local stakeholders in knowledge-based decision-making (WP5). Even though widely references in hundreds of articles, the concept of sustainability remains ill-defined and therefore impractical. In order to focus on sustainability aspects of cultural tourism, it is necessary to properly define a framework of appropriate and measurable indicators that can be tracked across time and space and fully encompass the multidimensional nature of the concept. In this policy report, attention will thus be paid to the operationalization of the concept of sustainable and resilient cultural tourism through the selection of indicators that can be collected longitudinally on local (ideally Local Administrative Units) level. Secondly, advantages of cultural tourism and its more sustainable nature – as opposed to other forms of (mass) tourism – are often implied but, as noted by the Cultural Heritage Counts for Europe Consortium (2015) report, lack comprehensive evidence. Via D4.2 of the SmartCulTour project (Petrić et al., 2021), the proposed relationship between cultural tourism development, destination sustainability, and resilience was empirically tested and the methodology as well as main findings and learnings are presented here. Finally, indicator collection is, in itself, only a first necessary step towards knowledge-inspired destination management. Therefore, inspired by D5.2 (Bertocchi et al., 2021a) of the SmartCulTour project, we discuss the potentials and best practices of decision-support systems to help visualize, compare and contrast destination-specific information for advanced tourism policy-making. At the end of the report, a number of policy recommendations are given on the topics of indicator selection and collection for sustainable tourism destinations, the link between cultural tourism, sustainability, and resilience, and the creation of robust and modular decision support systems, specifically: The need to adopt a communal core set of sustainability indicators, preferably following the standards set out by the European Tourism Indicator System; Supporting data collection, establishing the contribution of the tourism sector in destination impacts via additional dedicated research, and improving the speed of data availability by advocating the use of open data standards; Limiting participative stakeholder integration to indicator trimming, instead of adopting participatory approaches at the earliest stage of indicator selection; Adopting generally accepted definitions for cultural tourism development and resilience – as well as sustainability – in order to support continuous indicator measurement and the empirical identification of relationships; Adopting both quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of resilience in order to allow for integration of ‘built back better’ ideas; Integration of systems dynamics in decision support systems to allow for scenario analysis and cause-effect modelling; Provision of a general underlying data architecture at higher (preferably EU level) on which local destinations can build sustainable destination dashboards