Measuring the sustainability of tourism development in protected areas: an indicator-based approach

Dionysis Latinopoulos and Dimitra Vagiona

International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 2013, vol. 7, issue 3, 233-251

Abstract: The monitoring of an appropriate indicator set may provide useful directions and guidelines in order to assure a harmonious co-existence of tourism activities and ecological processes in protected areas. However, when developing a synthetic indicator there is always a balance to be struck between ease/cost of measurement and policy significance. The present paper attempts to simplify the measurement of tourism sustainability by proposing a two-step approach for developing a set of sustainable indicators under data limitations and financial constraints. An initial set of indicators is created through literature review and implementation of good practices in the selection process. The final set of indicators is specified based on stakeholders' involvement and multi-criteria analysis. The empirical application of this method was actually focused on tourism sustainability in the national park of Lake Kerkini (Serres, Greece). Nevertheless, the proposed approach can also be effectively applied in any protected area, park or nature reserve.

Keywords: carrying capacity; Lake Kerkini; protected areas; sustainable tourism; sustainability indicators; tourism development; Greece; stakeholder involvement; national parks; nature reserves. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=56942 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:ids:ijisde:v:7:y:2013:i:3:p:233-251

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().