Innovative Partnerships for Sustainable Urban Tourism

Europe’s cities and towns contain a rich cultural heritage. Yet, maintaining this heritage presents many challenges, including dealing with the adverse environmental and social impacts of mass tourism. Demands from urban tourism alike are high and growing, hence the pressures and problems associated with the management of the sector have to be systematically tackled by all parties concerned. Public-private partnerships are an increasing aspect of the delivery of public policies and services across the world, yet with a limited application in sustainable tourism development. This paper explores some of the theoretical and policy issues concerning the reasons for development and operating partnerships to promote urban sustainable tourism practices. A comparative evidence of existing partnership cases in four European countries demonstrates the merits and the 1 The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of the entire SUT-Governance research team (see partners description at http://sut.itas.fzk.de) and Walter Kahlenborn and Jenny Atmanagara from Ecologic GmbH (Berlin) who helped in generating some of the information on partnerships for sustainable (urban) tourism in the four study countries – Germany, Austria, Greece and Bulgaria.