Economic policy

Environmental economics

Ecology

Context (archaeology)

Performance indicator

Economics

Sustainable tourism

Environmental resource management

Archaeology

Sustainable development

Finance

Business

Biology

Marketing

Political science

Tourism

Geography

Commission

European union

Absorptive capacity

Sustainability

European commission

Journal of Sustainable Tourism

We aimed to evaluate the impact of sustainable tourism indicators on destination competitiveness with reference to the European Tourism Indicator System (ETIS), a scheme funded by the European Commission to address the evidence gap in tourism policy making. To do this, we evaluate the absorptive capacity of destination management organisations (DMOs) to implement and use sustainable tourism indicators to make policy decisions. We provide evidence of how DMOs have acquired knowledge about the importance of sustainable tourism indicators through ETIS, and how they have assimilated it by developing their own systems based on the principles of ETIS. However, we find that the European Commission had unrealistic expectations that DMOs, or their policies, would be transformed as a result of the use of indicators, or that indicators would be exploited to improve tourism sustainability and competitiveness. We contribute to the study of policy science by showing how absorptive capacity can be used to analyse and evaluate policy interventions, despite being a linear rational approach to explaining a complex policy context.

The impact of sustainable tourism indicators on destination competitiveness: the European Tourism Indicator System