Overcoming overtourism in Europe: Towards an institutional-behavioral research agenda

Benner Maximilian ()
Additional contact information
Benner Maximilian: Institute for Geography and Regional ResearchVienna UniversityUniversitätsring 11100 ViennaViennaAustria

ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography, 2020, vol. 64, issue 2, 74-87

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: behavioral economics; institutions; overtourism; tourism development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L83 Q56 Z32 Z38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/zfw-2019-0016 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:zfwige:v:64:y:2020:i:2:p:74-87:n:3

DOI: 10.1515/zfw-2019-0016

Access Statistics for this article

ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography is currently edited by Harald Bathelt and Sebastian Henn

More articles in ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().