Midiendo la sostenibilidad en territorios turísticosla aportación de la población residente

Abstract

From the 1990s onwards, sustainability became one of the objectives of the tourism sector. Since then, several institutions have created particularly significant and relevant indicator systems, covering the measurement of sustainability in areas where tourism is an important source of income. However, many of these systems do not consider the characteristics of the territory or the local idiosyncrasy. In practice, the use of 'generic' indicators omits and generalises problems of an environmental, social, political and economic nature, ignoring the fact that each territory has its own uniqueness which, in many cases, is what attracts tourists and visitors. This research analise the level of sustainability based on residents' perceptions. With more than 2,100 surveys conducted in coastal regions of Spain and Portugal, with strong seasonality and high tourism dependence at the economic level, it was concluded that local participation presents different characteristics in each destination, reinforcing the need to implement new techniques for measuring sustainability that have the opinion of the resident population as a way to facilitate the governance of the tourism territory.