Discussing impact assessment on creative tourism: a theoretical and analytical model

Abstract

Over the last decades, tourism has experienced exponential growth, expansion and diversification, being considered one of the most important socioeconomic sectors, an essential source of income and employment for many territories (e.g. Bellini et al. 2017; Romão and Nijkamp 2017; Weidenfeld 2018). In response to the concerns about the negative impacts of tourism and to improve the relationship between hosts and tourists, culture-based creativity is seen as a path to create competitive advantages and improve more sustainable practices in the tourism field.

Uma Avaliação sobre o Turismo Criativo

“…valor e potencial para transformar destinos. Estudos de impacto podem ajudar os formuladores de políticas e os gestores de turismo a identificar as práticas mais eficazes e sustentáveis, garantindo que os benefícios do turismo sejam amplamente distribuídos entre todos os stakeholders envolvidos, desde comunidades locais até investidores e governos (Tomaz;Costa;Gato;Cruz;Perestrelo, 2020).…”

Valuing culture and creativity impacts in a global technological era: reshaping the analytical framework

“…In addition, these impact assessment exercises typically have several other problems, such as the fact that they focus predominantly on more commodified cultural provision, on larger events, on activities carried out in more formal/institutional contexts, or provided in urban centres (neglecting or not being adapted to other realities). Thus, most of these exercises fail in not responding to the complexity of reality, the multidimensionality, multiplicity and time-range of impacts, and the specificity of each situation (UNESCO, 2009(UNESCO, , 2012(UNESCO, , 2019Tomaz et al, 2020). On the other hand, merely qualitative case studies, based on in-depth fieldwork with cultural agents and the communities, despite its frequently interesting results, end up always facing the barriers related to the difficulties of generalization, extrapolation and non-comparability with different realities.…”

“…Despite the huge debates on impact assessment conceptual challenges, which we will not address here in detail (cf. Tomaz et al, 2020, andGato et al, 2021, for the roots of our conceptual approach and for our discussion on this, as well as, e,g, Belfiori and Bennet, 2010;Galloway, 2009;CHCfE Consortium, 2015;CAE, 2018;Dessein et al, 2015), it is important to refer a diversity of methodological approaches and technique used in this field, at several levels and scales, including the toolbox approach, quantitative valuation methodologies (including market and non market based techniques, in line with traditional cultural economics approaches), as well as a diversity of qualitative methods, mostly used for assessing socio-cultural values (CHCfE Consortium, 2015).…”

“…Therefore, this paper discusses and proposes a general grid to assess the multidimensionality of value, drawing upon preceding work of co-creation of knowledge with creative and cultural agents, developed in the scope of the above mentioned research program, delivering a new analytical framework to do it. Being the delivering of this grid the main purpose of this paper, we do not enter here in detail in the inherent and precedent conceptual debates on impact assessment processes, and on its methodological challenges, neither in the discussion on specific results arising from operationalization and the application of this grid to specific cultural agents, which are both done elsewhere (Tomaz et al, 2020;Gato et al, 2021;Costa et al, 2021).…”

An impact self-assessment tool for creative tourism with insights from its application to the CREATOUR ® project.

“…Impact assessment framework for sustainable creative tourism. Image developed by authors (Tomaz et al, 2020), drawing upon the work of UNEP and WTO (2005, p. 20) Inspired by this four-dimensional structure, the question then became: from what perspective(s) should impacts be measured? To be relevant to the individual case and context, the impact assessment will vary depending on the perspective of interest (and what can be accomplished).…”