Tourism Governance at Stake: supporting decision makers in a small town through an Interactive Learning Environment

Governing interdependence between public and private organizations are central themes in designing tourism development policies. Due to spending review policies, cutbacks and budget shrinking, this aspect has assumed a crucial role in small local institutions. This study aims to show how small town policy makers, may improve their learning and therefore performance through a System Dynamics-based (SD) interactive learning environment (ILE). Such a learning tool was built to frame the governance setting, to identify sustainable growth strategies, to support the development of a small tourism destination in Sicily. To this end, three major decision makers – playing a crucial role in such environment – have been identified: the Mayor of the town, the museum’s director and a restaurant owner (as sample of the entire business sector). The ILE supports decision makers in outlining policies oriented to increase sustainably the flow of tourists over a 12-year time horizon. A two phase workshop setting was designed to allow the three players to initially run individually the “Dynamic Tourism Governance” ILE, under a predefined non-cooperative scenario. After a few runs and a short debriefing session, a collaborative scenario was run. In this second phase, the three decision makers might share ideas and strategies to foster the growth of flow of tourist in the small town. The use of “Dynamic Tourism Governance” ILE enables policy makers to: i) review their own mental models, ii) understand interdependence between different actors, perceive time delays between decision and results; iii) link short-term with long-term sustainable policies under financial, social and competitive point of view.

Key-Words: Rapporti pubblico-privato

Figure 1 A systemic framework embodying both the public and private sector and their capabilities to generate value through governance (Adaptation from Bianchi, 2016- 60)

Figure 2 The conceptual governance model of a destination, and the different dimensions of performance

Figure 3 Double loop learning (Sterman, 2000- 19)

Figure 4 The educational package architecture, as composed by the SD-based ILE and the debriefing sessions

Figure 5 The ILE interface- the home page (left) and the _Municipality_ control panel (right).

Figure 6 The causal loop diagram

Table 2 Loops dominance analysis and simulation graphs

Table1 Decision makers, policy levers, unit of measure and explanations