The curse of the beauty spot: governing the commons of tourist destinations

Why does overtourism pose some of the toughest collective action problems that we encounter in the economy? If local solutions are insufficient and top-down regulation would require more local knowledge than the central authorities can realistically possess, what is to be done?

Published in The Political Quarterly, Professor Waltraud Schelke, Visiting Professor, and Dr Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, PhD graduate and previously ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow and Guest Teacher in Political Economy of the Green Transition, have co-authored new research which analyses these two questions by drawing on examples from Santorini in Greece.

Abstract

"Tourism is a service industry with a self-destructive tendency. The more attractive the destination, the more overrun it becomes by visitors, degrading its attractiveness. This is a variant of the tragedy of the commons. The late Elinor Ostrom showed that tragedy is not inevitable. She and her collaborators studied how communities around the world manage to use common goods sustainably. We use the insights from her work to answer two questions. First, how can local stakeholders prevent the overuse of a tourist destination, on which their livelihoods depend? Second, if self-help is exceedingly difficult, what kind of public intervention would help? We address these questions based on the case of Santorini in Greece, where local stakeholders successfully govern the commons of high-quality wine production and have cooperated to upgrade local tourism services, but struggle to address the curse of the beauty spot. Ostrom's work, we argue, can help tackle the uniquely complex dilemmas posed by mass tourism today."