Sustainable Tourism and Projectification: Evidence from South-Eastern Italy

This article examines how public policy can be used to promote local tourism and steer it towards sustainability. It uses the municipality of Lecce—a medium-sized city in south-eastern Italy—and the broader Salento region as a critical case study, drawing on descriptive statistics, administrative data on local policy projects promoting culture and tourism, and fieldwork. In Lecce and Salento, local public authorities have been highly effective in expanding the tourism industry through territorial marketing campaigns and a participatory use of EU development funding. However, they have failed to address the sustainability challenges associated with the extreme concentration of tourism in space and time. I argue that this failure stems from projectification, understood as the pervasive tendency to organise public policy as a constellation of discrete projects. Projectification confines policy makers within narrow project bubbles, diverting attention from cross-cutting priorities and hindering the development of a coherent strategy for sustainable tourism.