Sustainability and the small destination: the EDEN project in Italy

• Autor(a) principal: Salvo, Paola de
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Calzati, Viviana, Campón‑Cerro, Ana María, Di‑Clemente, Elide, Hernández-Mogollón, José Manuel
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/rtd.v3i21/22.12173

The central hypothesis of this paper is that the quality of urban life, the collective well‑being and the sustainability can become competitive factors in local tourism development policies with particular reference to small destination. The present work shows how competitiveness of small destinations moves away from a paradigm that considers the concept of growth being synonymous of development. The development concept is broader and more comprehensive than that of growth, as it involves ethical and cultural aspects that lead it back to the improvement of quality of life. Thus, ‘degrowth’ (Latouche, 2003; Martinez‑Alier, Pascual, Vivien & Zaccai, 2010; Schneider, Kallis & Martinez‑Allier, 2010) and the ‘alternative growth’ (Layard, 2005; Van den Bergh, 2009; Van den Bergh & Kallis, 2012) are new paradigms of growth, which highlights the challenge that destinations have to face in order to switch from a quantitative to a qualitative pattern. The latter puts quality at the heart of development, as a leverage of competitiveness and social well‑being of local communities. The smaller destinations are areas most suited to development paths in which quality is a transversal factor and not the prerogative of a single sector. These destinations are more oriented to undertake sustainable development paths in which the quality, social capital and innovation play an important role in all areas such as the economy, the environment and cultural heritage, creating added value capable of reinforcing the entire territorial system. In this framework the EDEN (European Destinations of Excellence) project is an initiative promoted by the European Commission to promote models of sustainable tourism development for small destination throughout the European Union. This paper analyses the EDEN project experience in Italy, by identifying the distribution of candidate destinations in the various regions and the type of proposing subjects, opening up prospects of future research aimed at understanding the concrete effects of the EDEN project on the sustainable tourism development of the small destinations.