Towards a Circular Cultural Tourism Impact Assessment Framework for Decision Support in Less-Known and Remote Destinations

Recent environmental, climate and sustainability challenges are leading several sectors, including cultural tourism, to rethink their development model in a more sustainable and circular perspective, preserving fragile resources—including cultural resources—and regenerating natural capital. The assessment of the multidimensional impacts of cultural tourism strategies becomes an essential tool for designing specific positive impacts linked to the conservation, regeneration and valorisation of tangible and intangible cultural resources, together with natural resources, human and social capital. The Horizon 2020 Be.CULTOUR project developed a methodological and operational approach, based on a set of impact criteria and indicators, to guide the evaluation and monitoring process of cultural tourism strategies in less-known and remote cultural tourism destinations. The Be.CULTOUR multidimensional impact assessment framework was deemed to support the development and monitoring of strategic Action Plans for circular and human-centred cultural tourism, experimented in six European pilot heritage sites. The tool reconsiders the linearity of the Theory of Change, a collaborative and multistakeholder approach that is well suited to the conceptual framework of circular and human-centred cultural tourism, in order to move towards circular production and consumption models in the tourism sector, opening the way for the redesign of traditional decision-making processes. Thus, the proposed tool stimulates the construction of a dynamic and iterative evaluation process that falls within the framework of “circular” co-assessment.