Tourism and regional economic resilience from a policy perspective: lessons from smart specialization strategies in Europe

This paper deals with the contribution of tourism to regional economic resilience and questions the ways regional policy-makers recognize the relevance of tourism and integrate it into their regional development strategies (and, in particular, in regional innovation strategies). An exploratory analysis was carried out with a focus on the ‘smart specialization strategy’ documents, issued in Europe as required by the new programming phase of the structural funds. After defining the potential relevance of tourism as factor of regional economic resilience, a list of emerging innovation policies involving tourism was identified and linked to one of the following three types of regional economic resilience: ‘engineering resilience’, ‘ecological resilience’ and ‘evolutionary resilience’.