Identificador: TDX:2910
Autors: Santos Lacueva, Raquel
Resum:
This thesis aims to identify factors that determine the different degree of vulnerability to climate change, when two tourist destinations have the same physical characteristics and are threatened by the same impacts of climate change at the same intensity. This research focuses on sun, sand, and sea tourism, and the empirical analyses are conducted in the Riviera Maya (Mexican Caribbean coast) and the Alt Maresme (Spanish Mediterranean coast).
This thesis develops an innovative analytical framework that relates the vulnerability of tourism destinations to climate change and public policy. This research gathers two main information sources: on the one hand, programmatic documents of tourism and climate policies and, on the other, key stakeholders able to influence decision-making concerning tourism and climate change. In the case of documents, two content analyses are conducted: a critical argumentative analysis about the inclusion of ideas in tourism planning; and an analysis about the coherence in the formulation stage between the policy domains of tourism and climate. Thirty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders and these are analyzed qualitative and quantitively.
The results show that tourism destinations are more vulnerable to climate change due to some characteristics of public policy, such as the weakness of key ideas or the incoherence between tourism and climate policy domains. Moreover, the results confirm that beyond the territorial physical characteristics and the direct impact of climate change, there are contextual socio-political factors that influence the agenda, the decision-making, and the governance, and consequently these factors also condition the vulnerability of tourism destinations.
Repositori URV