A Regional Environmental Sustainable Tourism
Plan (RESTP) is a tool to plan tourism comprehensively
over a wide geographical area such as a region
or sub-region. It is a necessary response to
the current piecemeal and spatially fragmented
approach to tourism planning being exercised
in many parts of Europe. Innovatively, a RESTP
allows a planning authority, in liaison with
other local authorities and actors and beneficiaries,
to formulate and integrate sustainable tourism
policies at a spatial level with other policies
on land use planning, environmental protection,
conservation, cultural heritage, transport planning
and socio-economic development.
The RESTP is a stand alone, cross-sectoral
plan with a time horizon of 20 years and covering
a geographical area usually encompassing several
local authorities. It is therefore a framework
to co-ordinate, within this wider area, the
activities of several Government authorities
and agencies, Non-Government Organisations (NGOs)
and actors from the private sector. As the RESTP
area is also usually affected by local and in
some instances sub-regional and regional plans
(most often with statutory powers) the plan
is also designed to reflect, strengthen and
complement such plans (see Section 5 below).
The RESTP policies will include
a spatial strategy, which allocates different
types of sustainable tourism zones. Within such
zones tourism action areas and/or projects are
defined, each fully integrated as part of the
wider strategy, and phased according to priority
and longer-term horizons. Linked together as
tourism circuits, they will be responsible for
creating new tourism flows, typically in areas
where little to no tourism activities currently
exist. The plan is therefore a vehicle for both
identifying and planning a variety of new tourism
attractions, based principally on the eco-cultural
assets of a particular region. This will collectively
enhance and diversify the tourism product of
an area and hence attract new visitors.
To guide local co-operation and
management know-how, the RESTP may also include
pilot actions for certain priority tourism action
areas. These would typically involve actors
and beneficiaries who would plan and implement
on-the-ground actions so that these can be replicated
in other tourism action areas and projects over
the 20 year time horizon of the plan.
Uniquely, the plan transcends
spatial administrative boundaries and involves
the participation of a number of actors and
beneficiaries who hitherto have little to no
interaction in tourism planning, particularly
with regard to the spatial distribution of tourism,
environmental protection and cultural heritage,
as well as other related issues such as overall
land use planning, transport, access provision
etc. Together these can therefore use the RESTP
as a common vision for developing the nature,
scale and geographical distribution of tourism
that is sustainable in a particular region and/or
sub-region over the next 20 years. With actions
phased at short term (5 year), medium term (10
year) and long term (20 year) intervals, the
plan can also provide an implementation framework
for key stakeholders to invest in and develop
sustainable tourism.
The plan itself consists of an
explanatory statement backed by a series of
maps. Flexibility in the formatting of the plan
and the methodology should be retained to make
allowances for the many varied baseline conditions
and different forms of tourism found in European
regions.
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