A number of European tourist destinations have become the subject of a public debate on overtourism. The present article argues that problems discussed under the overtourism debate cannot be solved by limiting tourist numbers alone. Rather, the article calls for multidimensional strategies that build on a vision of qualitative tourism development shared by various coalitions of agents. Such a vision should consider which forms of tourism to encourage and which ones to discourage, and what incentives and disincentives to set. Designing and implementing these strategies raises a number of questions that can be grouped under the four dimensions of policies, organization, institutions, and behavior. Institutional approaches known from economic geography can serve to analyze the prospects of policies, and insights from behavioral economics such as the nudging approach can serve to inform policy implementation. These approaches are related to organizational and policy-related aspects of qualitative tourism development. By following the analytical framework provided by the four dimensions mentioned, the article proposes a research agenda for policy-relevant studies on curbing or preventing problems of overtourism.

Recent years have witnessed much experimentation with smart specialization strategies (RIS3) and entrepreneurial discovery processes (EDPs) in European regions. The EDP can be seen as an opportunity to address institutional questions. Because institutional patterns can explain why some policies are eventually successful while others are not, looking at the institutional context of regional economies can increase the effectiveness of regional policy. This article argues that the EDP functions as a framework to discover institutional patterns specific to a regional economy, and to define policies either consistent with existing institutions or aiming at institutional change. The article proposes a conceptual framework to understand and analyze the two institution-related roles of the EDP, first as an institutional discovery process and second as an institutional change process. The article builds on empirical case studies in two regions (Lower Austria, Austria and South Tyrol, Italy) and two small countries (Slovenia and Croatia). The case studies focus on how these regions or countries organized the EDP that eventually led to the formulation of their RIS3, and on the institutional dynamics of the EDP in discovering and changing institutions. The article concludes with policy implications that contribute to the debate on post-2020 EU Cohesion Policy.

The term overtourism has generated considerable attention both in academic discourse and public debate. The actual or perceived impact of overtourism on destinations has significant ecological, social, and cultural consequences. However, a crucial question remains unanswered: What does overtourism do to a destination’s tourism industry itself? At the core of this question is whether overtourism is a self-limiting phenomenon or a cumulative one, and how precisely overtourism shapes patterns of quantitative or qualitative decline of a destination’s tourism sector. This article offers a conceptual discussion of the impact of overtourism on a destination’s local tourism sector by refining the latter stages of Butler’s tourist area lifecycle through forms of path decline known from evolutionary economic geography. By combining these two theorical approaches and refining the typology of path decline from evolutionary economic geography to the case of tourism under an overtourism scenario, this article suggests that, in the absence of exogenous changes due to policy interventions or public pressure, under an overtourism scenario, a destination’s tourism sector might contract, downgrade, dislocate, and eventually even disappear. Further research should focus on how to prevent these forms of path decline.

Abstract:In the European Union and its neighborhood, regional development has increasingly come to focus on agglomerations during the last three decades. Notably, during the 1990s and early 2000s, clustering was the major policy focus in regional development. Currently, the concept of smart specialization is applied all over the European Union and is attracting interest in the EU's neighborhood. The tourism sector particularly tends to agglomerate regionally and even locally. While there is a large body of literature describing tourism clusters and while tourism features as a priority sector in many regional development strategies such as smart specialization strategies, there is a research gap on policy approaches applying agglomeration-oriented policy concepts to tourism destinations in an institution-sensitive way. This article argues that both cluster policy and smart specialization can be of considerable value for institution-sensitive tourism development, either when adapted to the specificities of the tourism sector or when integrating tourism development into wider, cross-sectoral strategies of regional development. Such a policy can be a valuable tool for local and regional development, provided that policies are designed in an institution-sensitive manner and respond to the particular institutional context prevailing in a tourist destination. The article illustrates some preliminary thoughts for institution-sensitive tourism development through cluster policy and smart specialization in Cyprus, Israel, and Tunisia.

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Abstract:The business environment in transition countries is often extraordinarily challenging for companies. The transition process these countries find themselves in leads to constant changes in the institutional environment. Hence, institutional voids prevail. These institutional voids cause competitive disadvantages for small and medium enterprises. Cluster policy can address these competitive disadvantages. As cluster policy generally aims at supporting companies' competitive advantage by spurring innovation and productivity, it can help to bridge institutional voids. This article's research question aims at analyzing and comparing cluster policies in the institutional context of two transition countries (Serbia and Tunisia) and analyzes to what extent cluster policies in these two countries are adapted to institutional voids prevailing there. The case studies offer insights into apparent difficulties of clusters in bridging formal institutional voids, as well as, notably, into the informal void of skill mismatches in the labor market. Still, for some specific voids, clusters do at least implicitly assume a bridging role. While the cluster policies examined do not explicitly target the institutional voids identified, cluster management can-in the course of time-align its service offering more closely with these voids. Bottom-up designed cluster policies can play an especially important role in such an evolution towards bridging institutional voids. OPEN ACCESSAdm. Sci. 2015, 5 189

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In recent decades, regional development has seen a wave of collective policy-making processes such as the European smart specialization approach or participatory approaches to tourism strategy formulation. These processes are confronted by several challenges based on behavioural patterns related to human agency. This paper conceptualizes collective regional policy-making processes in a behavioural perspective. It argues that concepts known from behavioural economics can contribute to our understanding of the agency-related challenges in collective regional policy-making processes, and that mitigating the role of human agency can help overcome these behavioural challenges. Case studies from three Austrian provinces show how major challenges to collective policy-making processes can be explained behaviourally, and how these challenges can be countered by mitigating strategies that employ expertise, moderation, indirect participation, delegation of prioritization and evidence.