A New Framework for Tourism Sustainability and Its Prototyping in Pilot Areas: Insights From BEST MED Testing Phase

Introduction

The BEST MED project is a joint initiative of eight Mediterranean areas, developed by academic partners, national public authorities, regional governments, destination management organizations, business associations, public foundations, and a network of other organizations towards the achievement of a shared model of Mediterranean Governance (Bramwell & Lane, 2011; Hall, 2011; Caffyn, & Jobbins, 2003). Its main challenges are to address seasonality and lack of effective cooperation among main tourism actors, promoting a shared and integrated tourism approach, to ensure sustainability principles towards planning and management. The project’s main expected result is to achieve tourism sustainable development in the improvement of existing cultural routes and neighbouring territories, entailing the importance of cultural heritage, creativity, and communities’ innovation, while preserving the natural environment.

All these processes are developed under the participation and engagement of local stakeholders (Thees et al., 2020; Bichler, 2019, Bichler, & Lösch, 2019), being determinant to analyse their commitment towards the processes of consultation and decision-making around the tourism phenomenon. This awareness is fundamental to address the existence of possible anti tourism discourses and feeling of overtourism by residents (Carreira et al., 2021; Pham et al., 2021; Koens et al., 2018), avoiding the perception that they are taken away from tourism economic and social benefits, and that tourists are more important to policy makers than the local community where tourism occurs.

The team from University of Algarve, as well as other BEST MED pilot areas, present a research-action methodological attitude, being responsible for the compliance of all testing processes in the project. It stands as a common strategy towards the development of all pilot activities, despite the local differences of the partners (which must be considered), as testing grounds for innovation, spaces for experimentation and learning, open to new ideas and approaches. Resulting from a network of local stakeholders, they create open and interactive spaces. The final objective is to Scale up after the piloting, (Hughes et al., 2018; van Popering & van Buuren, 2017; van Buuren & Loorbach, 2009; Vreugdenhil, 2010), to test shared methodologies of operationalization to the future, creating role models for forthcoming similar cases, forms of policy transferability, in fact, test temporary, ground-level achievements, and scientific outputs resulting from prototyping to long term answers. In this particular case, an effective and sustainable tourism governance for Sun and Sea Mediterranean tourism offers, with ground-level achievements in the improvement of existing cultural routes of the project’s pilot areas.

The BEST MED project was thought to address the traditional tourism seasonality and lack of cooperation among tourism actors, that influences the coastal areas of the Mediterranean. These dysfunctional elements of the tourism phenomenon in Costal Mediterranean areas, are not new, they are at the foundations of the development of the processes of leisure and space commodification (Karamustafa, & Ulama, 2010; Obrador et al., 2009; Richards, & Wilson, 2006; Rudihartmann, 1986) occurred in these areas. But, despite the presence of several elements of unsustainability, addressed by local actors, academics and as well as several policy makers, before the present COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism phenomenon was being developed under a mass tourism perspective, ending in processes of overtourism on several spaces of the seaside Mediterranean. So, the initial objectives of the BEST MED project, were strongly framed by this mass tourism offer and its main objectives were outlined under an overtourism and seasonality theoretical framework.