Tourism Planning and Tourism Development in the Italian Inner Areas: Assessing Coherence in Policy-Making Strategies

The purpose of this chapter is, thus, to contribute to the extant studies on tourism development as a component of local development policies, through amixed research strategy, at the intersections of the qualitative and quantitative traditions.More specifically, we contribute to this debate by constructing a theoretical space on which the planning documents produced by SNAI’s 22 pilot inner areas can be properly classified in order to assess the coherence with respect to their goals. This theoretical space was built on the basis of a literature review carried out through an anthropological lens, highlighting the role of communities and their cultures in bottom-up, placebased, and participative policy-making strategies. This review stresses the necessity of studying policy narratives to effectively categorise planned tourism interventions within the intersections between different policy approaches (spatially bling vs. place-based) and tourism development possibilities (based on emergent or existing resources). Hence, within the tradition of socio-statistical methods, we perform a content analysis of the planning documents using textual statistics techniques.