Amaia Sopelana

Cultural tourism (CT) has emerged as a critical driver of destination competitiveness; however, stakeholders struggle to balance heritage preservation, sustainable growth, and visitor management. Current decision making often lacks the practical information required to assess the multi-dimensional impacts of CT and to align strategies with sustainability goals. This paper presents a user-centred digital decision support system (DSS) developed under the European project IMPACTOUR. The methodological contribution is a procedure that uncovers links among strategies, actions, and performance indicators, conditioned on destination characteristics, by leveraging hierarchical multi-criteria analysis to weight sustainability domains. Co-designed with stakeholders, it integrates social and technological components and uses triangulated data to prioritise strategies and evaluate impacts. The visual interface offers a smart dashboard that supports strategic decision making and displays related key performance indicators, enabling stakeholders to monitor outcomes against predefined sustainability objectives. Pilot implementations in several European regions demonstrate the tool’s efficacy in fostering data-driven planning to achieve a balanced approach between tourism and liveability. While the system is scalable, its current limits include regional specificity and data availability. Future work will incorporate AI-driven predictive analytics and adapt the DSS for application in non-European contexts, providing a replicable framework for advancing sustainable tourism policies in culturally rich destinations.

In recent decades, the European policy on material cultural heritage (MCH) has shifted from a primary focus on preserving heritage elements to emphasizing the value that can be derived from them. This trend has led to an interest in quantifying the impact of cultural heritage on economic activity. However, determining the magnitude of this impact is not feasible without first defining the range of activities included in the MCH sector. This article reports the findings of a study to delineate the MCH sector. Combining a tight alignment with economic statistics categories and explicit endorsements from sector experts, the novelty of this delineation lies in the systematic application of the principle of exhaustiveness—recognizing all activities related to MCH regardless of their artistic, historical, or cultural content—while its practicality is ensured by mapping directly onto the categories used to compile European official statistics. Finally, characterizing the activities that constitute the MCH sector is not merely a conceptual exercise, it has direct practical implications, providing the indispensable basis for rigorous sectoral accounting consistent with national accounts standards.

Local economic development (LED) strategies at the district level—such as sub-city or neighbourhood initiatives—play a crucial role in fostering sustainable and inclusive urban growth. This study explores the critical factors influencing LED and urban regeneration at the district scale, emphasising the integration of sustainability, digital technologies, inclusivity, energy efficiency, community engagement, and innovation into strategic planning. To prioritise these CFs, a tailored survey was distributed among a group of 13 city experts from European cities, involved in research projects focused on district-level quality-of-life enhancements through building retrofits, urban space interventions, energy community promotion, and technological deployment. By focusing on the district level, this research highlights the importance of tailoring strategies to local contexts and leveraging the unique characteristics of each neighbourhood. The findings reveal the need for local governments to enhance the capacity of administrative staff to engage citizens and direct external support for development projects. The normative recommendations derived from this study are specifically grounded in district-level research and practice, ensuring their applicability to sub-city areas. This paper concludes that a context-specific and collaborative approach is essential for achieving equitable and sustainable economic development at the district level.

Effective decision-making in tourism destinations relies significantly on employing suitable indicators for policy design and impact evaluation. However, the adoption of sustainability-focused indicators remains constrained in the field of cultural tourism. The purpose of this research is to provide decision-makers with an extensive array of criteria and indicators, enabling informed decision-making, policy formulation, and impact assessment tailored to the distinctive attributes encountered in European destinations. Based on the synthesis of existing approaches, and in co-creation with 21 European tourism destinations, an indicator-based framework is proposed, structured around the environmental, economic, social, cultural, resilience, and characterization domains. The results are particularly novel in the resilience and cultural domains, related to the recovery from crisis impacts, but also to the enhancement of digital approaches, as well as the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage towards a more hospitable destination. Moreover, the involvement of stakeholders incorporating real-case scenarios allows this research to bridge the gap between theoretical constructs and practical application. The indicator-based framework resulting from this research will provide stakeholders with assistance in assessing and comparing the impacts of cultural tourism on their destinations and, thence, help them acquire knowledge on cultural resource management, contributing to a more sustainable, responsible, and balanced impact.

Innovation in the circular economy (CE) and the deployment of effective circular business models (CBM) have attracted significant attention in times of growing natural resource scarcity. Despite this widespread interest, significant challenges remain between theoretical innovations and effective CBM implementation in any industrial sector where companies pursue cost-saving opportunities through waste valorisation strategies. Since current methods mislead in terms of the real limitations to designing feasible novel products and services under a circular economy, this study proposes exploring determinants underpinning the organisational resilience of CBMs under a resource efficiency strategy through three case studies. As a result of a co-creation process, the implementation of a CBM framework was built upon empirical data and, thence, a phase-based implementation guide was laid out to assist companies in designing and implementing innovative CBM dealing with the complexity of innovative waste valorisation strategies between the PPI and construction sectors. Relevant findings on managerial and policy recommendations encountered along the demo stage are provided in this paper favouring an effective implementation of CE strategies: the role of technological and non-technological aspects within the CBM, the perspective of the ecosystem and its value proposition, and specific guidelines for the different phases of CBM life cycle.

Governance, financing, and business models are deeply interlinked and relevant for the successful implementation of urban nature-based solutions (NBS). However, during the definition of urban NBS projects the importance and interrelation of these models are usually neglected. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents an overarching framework (conceptual and operational) and a derived preselection web tool which interrelate governance, financing, and business models for NBS projects. First, based on recent literature, governance, financing, and business models that could be applied to NBS were mapped, and their integration proposed. Later, key contextual factors influencing NBS implementation were identified. They form the basis of a WHAT–WHO–HOW framework that structures the links between specific NBS projects, their implementation context, and the most suitable models. From that framework, and an analysis of 50 successful NBS case studies, a suitability matrix was developed with known models. The matrix allows pairing types of NBS and their initiating actors with suitable financing and governance models. Lastly, a tailored NBS business model canvas was designed to evaluate the business model components. From the overarching framework, the preselection web tool was created to guide decision-making on suitable governance, finance, and business models in the early phases of NBS projects.

According to recent literature in the field of sustainability, the circular economy (CE) appears to be a thriving opportunity for creating new businesses, although less attention has been paid to the form in which its principles fit into a comprehensive framework that enables companies to design it in a practical way. This paper presents the methodology that has been adopted to pave the way to a coherent reference framework for circular business model innovation and its outstanding design and implementation, taking into consideration the entire value and supply chain. A unique analysis of recent innovations in circular economy models is provided herein, together with an exhaustive analysis of those elements that enable or hinder their implementation. The main interactions among all those critical elements influencing how organisations innovate and operate cooperatively within a CE ecosystem are also evaluated. In addition, a study of five industrial cases in the pulp and paper industry allowed searching for industrial insights and empirical evidence of the relevance of those elements, including observation, document analysis, and interviews. Lastly, the main outcomes of this research are illustrated using the CE reference framework designed when applied to the aforementioned industrial cases, and relevant insights into future improvements are also provided.

There is increasing attention on the need for dynamic approaches to manage organisational change in order to sustain competitive advantage in changing business environments. Current frameworks and methods are misleading in terms of the fact that flexibility is a temporal and dynamic condition for survival in environments with a high degree of variability in most real-world organisations. This study aims to examine determinants underpinning organisational change strategies throughout the enterprise lifecycle in order to develop a predictive method that will help managers in the design of effective change options dealing with the complexity of organisational flexibility. A system dynamics model was constructed based on theoretical and empirical data from a case study of a Spanish cooperative company. Then, the predictive method shows the impact of managers’ decisions on organisational flexibility through simulations. The effectiveness of change strategies is investigated through the dynamic behaviour of key variables. These factors cause relevant delays on the desired results and could force firms to choose an inappropriate path for change. This study offers significant implications for theory and practice.