Strumenti di gestione territoriale e politiche pubbliche per lo sviluppo sostenibile

In Italy the lack of a strategic approach in the tourism sector is particularly evident. For a long time everyone enjoyed its extraordinary natural resources, and in the past tourists fell for the Italian destinations in spite of the absence of a well-structured supply. For some years, however, the context is going to radically change and, above all, the habits of making tourism are going to change too. The need for a change becomes more and more urgent when tourist activities are developed in sensitive areas such as protected ones; it is now a fact that the demand for eco-tourism, green tourism and sustainable ethical tourism is growing, and therefore the importance of the implementation of programmatic actions as well as long-term territorial planning becomes absolutely fundamental priority. There are many tools available to government agencies and local public bodies that may contribute to the aim of economic, social and environmental sustainability. One of them is the European Charter for Sustainable Tourism (ECST) that is a voluntary and contractual relationship between the body of a park management, tourism enterprises and the local population, all of them to develop tourism in keeping with the sustainable management of natural resources of the protected area. This is essentially the combination of a process of participatory planning and a management system and control that materializes in the identification of a five-year Action Plan built on collaboration between public sector, private sector and local population and reflecting the strategy of the protected area in the field of sustainable tourism. The National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise decided to join in this process, recognizing the need to revamp the tourism sector in its territory and to identify the right path to follow ECST. The strong point of the Charter is by far the buttom-up approach that leads to the organization of regional forums, meetings and negotiations in which responsible entity for management of the protected area, municipalities, local authorities, local companies to promote tourism, economic operators and representatives of local associations are called down. This paper reports the achievements in cooperation with the Park Authority and a designated official Federparchi in terms of area-based analysis (called Diagnostic Report); then it attempts to show what comes out of the analysis, in particular what about the strengths and weaknesses of the tourism sector as well as the opportunities for stakeholders placed into the park. In order to organize forum, socio-economic development of tourism and the territorial homogeneity for tourist development were taken into account. In so doing, three territories were identified and three meetings were held for each of them. The meetings were preceded by a plenary session during which a draft of the diagnostic report was presented and they were settled with an illustration of the strategy and actions that the Park Board and stakeholders of the area are committed to taking forward. The actions - as the result of the work of consultation and sharing of shared vision and mission of the tourism sector of the Park and the actors of the territory - were compared with the foreseen measures in the 2007-2013 plans of all the three regions where the Park is placed in order to highlight the consistency in the measures as well as to identify the possible sources of funding for programming plans and projects covered in the agenda of the ECST. It was also carried out an ex ante evaluation of the possible effects due to acquisition and implementation of the ECST action program on environmental issues of the Park by the use of some specific indicators of the tourism sector. Thus, matrices were produced that can be employed for monitoring the implementation process of the Charter.