Stakeholder Participation in Planning of a Sustainable and Competitive Tourism Destination: The Genoa Integrated Action Plan

The outbreak of COVID-19 confronted the international community with critical health, social, and economic challenges. Travel and tourism were among the hardest affected sectors. In 2020 and 2021 new travel trends emerged, emphasizing local destinations, short distances, and consequently, lower-carbon transportation (proximity tourism). Post-pandemic recovery represents an opportunity to bounce back better by rethinking the sector's economic model for the sake of sustainability and innovation. This paper disseminates the research that led to the structuring of guidelines for a breakthrough and inclusive municipal-level action plan for the promotion of sustainable tourism, as part of the Tourism Friendly Cities project. An operational methodology is discussed here, whereby key stakeholder participation, conceptualized through a sextuple helix model, is the foundation of the planning process. A small-scale action and a qualitative assessment tool of the participatory process are also illustrated. The proposed methodology corroborates the vast positive effects deriving from stakeholder participation in terms of trust, ownership, planning quality, innovativeness and sustainability of interventions. In applying the methodology, although the digital framework was evaluated positively in terms of the number of participants that could be involved, data collection, and confidentiality of activities, the evaluation shows that hybrid modes of participation are more desirable.

Reward Mechanisms in COVID-19 Tracking Apps and Its Impact on the Voluntary Participation of the Public in Sustainable Innovation Processes

The COVID-19 pandemic is the first pandemic after smartphones penetrated society globally. Consequently, there are not sufficient experiences and understanding of how to engage citizens in information and scientific processes that create public awareness and responsibilities according to scientific needs. For effective measures aiming to sustain the pandemic crisis, an efficient collaboration of academia, economy, culture-based, and media-based public and politics is crucial. With help of the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS) approach for assessment, COVID-19 tracking apps (CTAs) of different countries are analysed with help of a qualitative content analysis according to their reward mechanisms. The analysis includes correlation different rewards to voluntary participation. The MARS approach consists of engagement, functionality aesthetics and information quality. The protection of voluntariness is understood as the fundamental need for the ethical use of CTAs. Accordingly, patterns of voluntariness are examined in the context of legal, ethical privacy and security policies of selected CTAs. In this context, this paper will provide categories and criteria for CTA usage and its impact on citizen engagement in the Quintuple Helix collaboration process aiming to get insights into features and functionalities needed in CTAs and increased voluntary use of the public.