Autor/a

Javier Mendoza Jimenez (Universidad de La Laguna)

Coautor/es

Raúl Hernández Martín (SIN ORGANIZACIÓN ASIGNADA)

Alberto González Yanes (Instituto Canario de Estadística (ISTAC))

There is a rising concern about how to make the increasing tourism activity sustainable which results in more attention being paid into the measure of sustainability from both international organizations and scholars. However, the majority of existing methodologies are still developed at national level, leaving the sub national activities still as an almost unexplored field.

In this article, we use the island of Lanzarote, in the Canarian archipelago, as a case study to develop a statistical framework that addresses the problem of measuring sustainability on small tourism islands.   We have followed Dwyer, Dragićević, Armenski, Mihalič, & Knežević Cvelbar, (2014) to realize an Importance - Performance analysis applied to a tourism destination and obtain the correspondent weights for each category of indicators. We rely as well  on previous studies that intended to measure destinations´ sustainability at sub national level like Wise (2016) using the Triple Bottom Line, the European Tourism Indicator System (European Union, 2016) and the work of Gallego-Galan, & Moniche-Bermejo (2014) in the case of Andalusia.

We propose a basic scheme of economic, social and environmental indicators to measure tourism sustainability and highlight the need to develop sub national statistics in order to have more accurate data that allow a proper measuring and comparison with other destinations. We believe that our statistical framework can be replicated in other territories of similar nature and is especially useful for the Small Island Developing States as defined by the United Nations.

Palabras clave: sub national, sustainability, statistical framework