Multidimensional Analysis of Regional Tourism Sustainability in Spain

- We approach the measurement of regional tourism sustainability.
- Multicriteria methods have been used for the construction of composite indicator.
- The Spanish regions are being analyzed.
- The weak and strong sustainability concepts have been considered.

In a context of expansion and development of the tourism sector worldwide, assessing the tourism sustainability performance of regions or countries becomes an important goal of strategic planning as a means to ensure an appropriate balance between present and future opportunities of areas with a tourism-based economy. Due to the multidimensional nature of the sustainability concept and the difficulties encountered in its measurement, composite indicators have increasingly been used as useful tools for the operationalization of sustainability. In this paper the study of tourism sustainability of Spanish regions is addressed by building a composite indicator that uses multicriteria decision techniques for the aggregation and weighting of the simple indicators considered. The developed index allows the representation of both the weak and strong sustainability paradigms, as well as other compromising, midway concepts between those. Moreover, the sustainability performance of the studied regions can be easily compared and a fair ranking of the regions can accordingly be obtained, which can serve as a starting point that stimulates public and private debate and promotes improvement actions to achieve sustainability.