Sustainable Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Communities: Negotiating between Equity and Integrity

In the Euro-Mediterranean context, the concept of sustainable tourism – particularly sustainability related to cultural tourism and cultural heritage – has been investigated at length (du Cros and McKercher, 2022). In general, however, most contributions are rooted in economic and managerial approaches, and often focus solely on the analysis of tourism flows (Giglio et al., 2019; Bertacchini and delle Nogare, 2021), whereas approaches to sustainability from the scientific field of Cultural Heritage studies are less prevalent (Roblek et al., 2021; Rasoolimanesh et al., 2021; Loulanski and Loulanski, 2011). This hints at the existence of an underlying bias in the literature on the topic, which may derive from the implicit assumption that “cultural” tourism – i.e., tourism strongly rooted in experiences involving historical and archaeological heritage – may be “sustainable” in and of itself (Cerruti, 2021; Richards, 2018). Consequently, cultural tourism is often regarded as “good” tourism by definition. From this perspective, the very notion of sustainability appears blurred, and one fundamental question is avoided, namely: “sustainable for whom?” or “sustainable for what?”. And yet, ascertaining whether a cultural tourism experience or industry is sustainable for the physical integrity of the cultural assets themselves, and/or for the heritage communities that operate around those cultural assets, is crucial.