The Mediterranean is the world’s number one tourist destination and the biggest tourism region in the world, which has been visited by 260 million tourists in 1990 and what is more, it is expected that this number will increase to 655 million by the year 2025.
In the last 10 years Croatia and Turkey became two of the most popular Mediterranean destinations, and joined the trend of a growing number of European cities that are promoting the development of tourism in order to overcome the post-industrial crisis, or as in the case of Croatia, the post-war crisis.
Consequently, today both countries see tourism as their economic future. However, to achieve continuous and sustainable development of tourism, three interrelated aspects should be taken into consideration: economic, social, and environmental.
The main question that we tried to answer is in what ways tourism is contributing to the sustainable development of the local community – based on the case studies of Alanya in Turkey, and Dubrovnik in Croatia. Both communities have experienced rapid development of the tourism sector in the last 10 years, which still seems to rise continuously. As a result, various impacts have occurred. Some of them are positive and there is an obvious contribution to sustainable development, while some of the impacts have negative influence on sustainability.
Source: Blekinge Institute of Technology
Author: Beban, Ana | Ok, Huseyin