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, eco- nomic 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 guar- antee the long-term sustained and sustainable growth of local economies relying on tourism. The incorporation of these principles into the policy- making process requires the simultaneous consideration of a broad set of interests and goals, often conflicting among them. Thus, promoting sustain- able tourism requires governments to adopt a strategic approach to plan- ning, 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 tour- ism 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 tour- ism on local economies, while not hampering the achievement of other policy goals, such as expenditure efficiency and consistency of investments.