Development in mountain areas: Sustainable Performance Index (SPI)

Many international documents consider sustainable tourism fundamental to promote local development and a virtuous local economic growth. Development of sustainable tourism policies could be a useful way for encouraging new forms of business, promoting employment and assuring an efficient conservation of landscape and environment as stated in Lanzarote Charter in 1995 and Rimini Charter in 2001. Referring to this scenario, the application of European Charter for Sustainable Tourism in Protected Areas represents a referential methodology for local development in protected areas and a possibility to involve local stakeholders in sustainability’s policy definition. Actually, European Charter process conjugates economic, social and environmental aspects as a basis for the definition of future scenarios of local development. In many cases integrated sustainability indicators are developed within participated process. The attempt to measure sustainability has to face some conceptual challenges: the concept of sustainability is not univocally defined and the efforts to measure it are difficult to implement; sustainability is not a universal concept: it may be influenced by local environmental, social and economic context, which can require to give more attention to specific aspect rather than others; although in many cases it is difficult to achieve, law compliance is not enough to define as sustainable a model of development. The present study represents an innovative attempt to evaluate sustainability as a whole, in the perspective of defining specific targets, through the definition of indicators suitable to measure and evaluate temporal evolution of development policies, mainstreaming sustainability to reduce adverse effect on the environment and to promote conservation of local and traditional values. Application of sustainability indicators to measure welfare and development at local scale is strategic to evaluate the effects of short and long term period of the strategy developed through the participated process of European Charter method. Sustainability indicators and their evolution in time could represent a useful tool for decision makers to assess policy efficacy in defining models of sustainable tourism, particularly in depressed and transforming areas.