Sustainable Tourism Community

The Project

Created in November 2016 within the framework of the Interreg MED Programme, the Sustainable Tourism Community has been renewed for a three-year period until December 2022 to make tourism a real driver for inclusive and sustainable growth.

The Community can now rely on 28 territorial cooperation projects and almost 400 organisations (public authorities, private companies, universities, NGOs and international organisations) active in 13 European countries to promote sustainable tourism by capitalizing on tools and good practices developed by its projects. Besides, two Strategic Projects, approved in October 2019, focusing on governance of sustainable tourism will join forces with the Community to make tourism a real driver for inclusive and sustainable growth.

Most notably, the Community’s members are leading the development of innovative tools to monitor the tourism industry, they are studying and testing new tourism models and they are actively engaging policy makers and managers in a constant dialogue to make tourism a real driver for inclusive and sustainable development. The main objective of this new phase of the Community is to influence economic and social development strategies to include sustainable tourism policies at regional, national and European level. To attain these renewed objectives the project partnership leading the Community has slightly changed to include a network association of regional policy-makers and to extend the geographical area to the Balkan region.

Project Partners

The MED Sustainable Tourism community is an Interreg MED Programme initiative coordinated by DIBA – Barcelona Provincial Council (Barcelona, Spain) in partnership with UNIMED – Mediterranean Universities Union (Rome, Italy), University of Thessaly (Thessaly, Greece), NECSTouR – Network of European Regions or Sustainable and Competitive Tourism (Brussels, Belgium), Plan Bleu UNEP MAP, the Regional Activity Centre of Mediterranean Action Plan (Marseille, France), Adriatic and Ionian Euroregion (Pula, Croatia), RDA Green Karst – Regional Development Agency (Pivka, Slovenia).