Chapter 13: Sustainable Tourism: A Decision Support System Proposal for Policymaking

Over the last decades, tourism has become a fundamental engine of both developed and developing economies. A wide set of negative social, economic and environmental implications of tourism have been recognised along with the recognised positive effects. In this vein, sustainable tourism principles have been developed and widely accepted as a means to guarantee the long-term sustained and sustainable growth of local economies relying on tourism. The incorporation of these principles into the policymaking process requires the simultaneous consideration of a broad set of interests and goals, often conflicting among them. Thus, promoting sustainable tourism requires governments to adopt a strategic approach to planning, through goal-oriented, participatory and comprehensive governance mechanisms. Based on these, the following chapter is aimed at presenting a novel decision support system for policymakers, in which sustainable tourism principles and measures are accounted for, together with other purely economic and strategic issues. This strategic approach is operationalised through a multi-objective optimisation model. The main results show that the inclusion of sustainable tourism principles into the planning phase of public investments allows to boost the potentially positive effects of tourism on local economies, while not hampering the achievement of other policy goals, such as expenditure efficiency and consistency of investments.