Indicators for cultural and creative industries’ impact assessment on cultural heritage and tourism

Abstract

Cultural heritage is an important factor in ensuring regional development. Practice has demonstrated that first sustainability of heritage sites needs to be ensured and tourism they generate should also be re-visited as current over-tourism models are unsustainable. The assumption is that cultural/creative industries (CCI) can be a powerful tool for heritage livability as well as for sustainable tourism based on experiences. In order to stimulate regional development, specific CCI measures are often introduced in public policies but results of policy interventions are rarely monitored. Their performance can be measured against the pre-set indicators. Research studies focusing on such indicators are scarce. This short communication provides a possible conceptual framework alongside concrete indicators for cultural/creative industries’ sector impact assessment on cultural heritage and sustainable experiential tourism on the policy as well as on the project level. Desk research and brainstorming methods were applied to design the indicator sets resulting in a tool which is to be further tested and used in practice.