Text and image courtesy of Joao Martins, UNINOVA Lisbon.
Policy roundtable of EU-funded projects on sustainable cultural tourism | Digital meets Culture
On October 11th 2022, a policy round table was held between European policy-makers and representatives of the six projects funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Call “Transformations” on Innovative approaches to urban and regional development through cultural tourism:
- IMPACTOUR (Joao Martins and Marinos Ioannides)
- SmartCulTour (Bart Neuts and Lidija Petrić)
- SPOT (Milada Šťastná and John Shaddock)
- TExTOUR (Julia Delenikas and Daniel Basulto)
- Be.CULTOUR (Antonia Gravagnuolo and Aliona Lupu)
- INCULTUM (José Maria Civantos)
The discussion was very fruitful and addressed several policy making issues, such as:
- EU Policy
- Europeanisation
- EC Research & Innovation coordination
- Innovation
- Europeanisation
- Sustainable Development
- Infrastructure
- Implementation
- Continuous Monitoring and Evaluation
Be.CULTOUR project contributed with reflections on data management aspects of sustainable and circular cultural tourism, focusing on data availability, tourism dashboards and financial opportunities especially in rural and remote areas. Entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems should be strengthened in less-known cultural tourism sites, enhancing cooperation within the target regions and between European regions, including non-EU countries. This is the challenge of Be.CULTOUR project, which explores new innovation paths for collaborative, place-based, human-centred and circular cultural tourism in Europe and beyond. The results of the Be.CULTOUR Policy Learning Lab held in Brussels with pilot and mirror partners were introduced to enrich the results of the workshop.
Representatives of the European Commission announced the launch of the EU Tourism Dashboard, which will represent a key reference for tourism data in Europe, focusing on environmental sustainability, digitalisation and social impact of tourism across European regions. All data are now available in the platform.
This meeting was held after several internal meetings between the aforementioned six projects.
About the sister projects:
- IMPACTOUR https://www.impactour.eu/
- SMARTCULTOUR http://www.smartcultour.eu/
- SPOT http://www.spotprojecth2020.eu/
- TEXTOUR https://textour-project.eu/about/
- BE.CULTOUR https://becultour.eu/
- INCULTUM https://incultum.eu/
The results will be published in a next Policy Document on sustainable cultural tourism in Europe, which is currently in the preparation phase with all project coordinators and participants in the workshop.