How Do Digital Initiatives Foster UNESCO Sites' Sustainable Engagement? An Accountability Perspective

Covid-19 pandemic and environmental changes stressed the vulnerabilities of current tourism systems. On the one hand, Covid-19 pandemic made many existing tourism and destination management strategies obsolete. On the other hand, environmental change caused a rethinking of preservation strategies for most susceptible destinations such as UNESCO sites. In this regard, the need to develop new sustainable strategies for tourism businesses and destinations emerged. Sustainable strategies, in fact, have been identified as the cutting edge to avoid both over tourism, overcrowding, and preservation of tourism systems. In recent times, anyway, the importance of ICTs emerged in parallel. Specifically, trough ICTs managers may communicate relevant information to visitors, gather feedbacks and influence their behaviors. Building on these premises, the research aims to observe how ICTs could be used to involve visitors in dialogic accounting practices, increase accountability performance, and foster visitors’ sustainable behaviors. To do so, role theory and accountability theory has been jointly considered as a starting point to develop a conceptual framework and infer implications for theory and practice.