Access to international tourism markets by local actors. A systems thinking-based analysis on enhancing the collective capacity of a destination to attract the desired type of tourism: The case of the Cajas Massif Biosphere Area

Tourism has long been sought as a promising path for local development. With this objective in mind the attraction of international markets is particularly interesting because they stimulate innovation, offer varied segments and generate income from abroad. Furthermore, the steady increase of international travellers and the wide dissemination of communication technologies create a positive environment for exploiting those opportunities. In such a context, any destination endowed with world-class attractions, entrepreneurial capacity and political will seems in the perfect position to benefit. Nevertheless, the usual case with the potential of tourism for local development is that there are large gaps between what is envisioned and what is implemented. That is mainly because tourism is a complex phenomenon, especially in international contexts, where there are multiple levels of participants. Hence, a destination, as a collective of actors trying to act together, is rarely capable of proactively attracting the desired type of visitors. As a result, tourism develops in improvised ways, with little or no influence by local actors on the final outcomes. Therefore, this doctoral dissertation draws upon knowledge about how to improve the influence of a destination on the determinants of international market access with the perspective of supporting local development goals. For that, this study combines a systemic approach, collective action studies and a novel analytical model. First, to lay the theoretical foundations, I discuss systems thinking and social capital in the context of the tourism phenomenon. Second, I introduce a tourism-specific integrative model and analytical methodology. And third, taking Ecuador, and more specifically the Cajas Massif Biosphere Area as the destination, and Germany as the source market, I look at social capital to study how to improve the capacity of a collective to influence the key determinants of market access. The proposed integrative model proved useful for guiding an organised questioning process, analytically linking social capital and tourism as phenomena that behave as complex systems. Findings highlight the importance of collective trust as a key dimension for bridging the gap between vision and implementation. Also, it was identified that market access enhancement depends more on internal determinants, such as having sustained processes, than on external determinants, such as marketing capacities. To tackle such determinants, collectives require actors with: the ability to facilitate cooperative environments at different levels, the appropriate networking structures and specialised professional skills. Summarising, there are factors that can indeed enhance a destination’s capacity to attract specific types of visitors, but the complexity of achieving it as a collective is usually underestimated and approached in a superficial manner.