Instruments of Structural Policies for Tourism Sustainability

The paper focuses on the link between the sustainability issue and the notion that tourism is the encounter of hosts and guests. Accordingly, it defines sustainable tourism (ST) as a social equilibrium around an agreed plan of sustainable de-velopment. Within the simplified framework of two internally homogeneous populations, our heuristic schemes to understand their forms of interaction recall known findings of the theories of multi-population dynamics and evolutionary game theory. A sufficient condition for sustainable tourism (ST) to emerge is that the two populations share the interest and, thus, are willing to strategically cooper-ate in the sustainable exploitation of local resources. That those resources are, in general, of the public good or common-pool sort, creates known problems of potential conflict. They may also lead to “perversely” cooperative behaviors with hosts and guests joining forces in over harvesting. A simple game setting clarifies that TS is an equilibrium property associated with a supporting social agreement, and pinpoints conditions for its emergence. One gets closer to “reality” with an evolutionary game theoretic view which al-lows for heterogeneity between the two populations as to preference structures and social norms, and sketches out their evolution. We can thus find the conditions for the emergence of the desired virtuous outcome from an initially conflicting situation. One such necessary condition is the repeated encounter between the two populations, whereby fear of punishment drives an evolutionary process of strategy modification towards cooperative behaviors. As this condition is hardly realized with tourism, new policy mechanisms and procedures have to be designed to induce reciprocal adaptation.