Governance and wicked problems. Theoretical considerations to approach tourism problems

Abstract

This article discusses the theoretical principles of wicked problems and governance, in order to understand and address the problems that arise in a tourist destination. The analysis starts with a review of the literature including the problems generated by tourism, the way they are linked with other areas and their political condition. Subsequently, this situation is connected to the explanatory framework, which reveals that the complexity of the problems is the result of the diversity of settings of each tourist destination, which are closely related to the political distance between the public-private actors affected by the activity. The study concludes that understanding the context where tourism takes place is important to generate cooperative schemes that can evolve towards collaborative governance networks where trust and common objectives are established, in order to deal with the complexity of problems.