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Abstract
To ensure effective management, tourism governments need tools that can measure tourism activities’ impacts on sustainable development. Systems of indicators are thus widely used in tourism sustainability management and need to find a balance between academic and professional perspectives. This research is a case study focused on a tool for monitoring regional government policies: the Andalusia System of Sustainable Tourism Development Indicators (SISTA). The system was developed by an interdisciplinary group of 15 experts from within the regional government and academia. We apply the institutional theory in the tourism public sector to study a process of deinstitutionalization to get insights on how actors within tourism management organizations can shape institutions. Our results demonstrate that policy actors’ participation enhances these systems’ usefulness, introducing the sustainability policy paradigm and raising awareness of the strategic uses of data to support policy decisions. On the other hand, challenges of policy actors’ participation are related to the mismatch between sustainability evolution and policy cycles, and from the difficulty of judging policy measures’ efficiency. This research will serve as a reference for other tourism destinations working on measuring system development with practical applications as well as for academia to integrate policy actors’ needs into theoretical approaches.
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted while the authors were working at the Public Enterprise for the Management of Tourism and Sports of Andalusia, but the opinions expressed here are the authors’ sole responsibility. We gratefully acknowledge funding received from “Programa de ayudas a la investigación de la Facultad de Comercio y Gestión de la Universidad de Málaga”.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ana Moniche
Ana Moniche-Bermejo MSc has been working for Tourism Regional Government of Andalusia (Turismo Andaluz) for almost 22 years. Her experience ranges from tourism statistics, implementation of surveys and exploitation of results, supply and demand analysis, impact of cultural or sports events, econometrics and time series, sustainable tourism indicators systems, sustainability and tourism. Within her responsibilities at Turismo Andaluz she has been involved in several European projects and international networks since 2015. From September 2012 she was a research associate at the Centre for Competition Policy Based at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) for one year, where she was involved in a research related to energy collective switching and consumer behaviour. She is a PhD candidate at Programa de Doctorado en Economía y Empresa, Universidad de Málaga, Departamento de Teoría e Historia Económica.
Inmaculada Gallego
Dr. Inmaculada Gallego Galán has a PhD in Tourism Planning and Management from the University of Malaga. She is currently the Head of the Statistics and Market Research Area for the regional Government of Andalucía (Spain) and an associate professor for the Department of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Malaga. In addition, she has extensive experience in different areas of tourism research (e.g., economic analysis, market research, tourism management analysis, etc.) but his research focuses on the creation and development of indicators systems for the management of tourist destinations.