Prof. Philippe Jean-Pierre (p), Mr Kévin Trouspance

Small island destinations are exposed to multiple vulnerabilities (climatic, health, economic) related to their location (isolation, exposure to cyclonic risks) and to their geographical characteristics (limited land area, demographic pressure). The uncontrolled development of tourism, on which the growth of many island territories depends, tends to reinforce these fragilities. Among the dynamics contributing to this tourism entropy is overtourism, which weakens the robustness of destinations that have experienced success. Although widely studied, overtourism is approached through quantitative indicators based on international tourist flows.

These indicators are poorly suited to emerging destinations where overtourism may arise despite moderate external flows. In certain isolated continental territories or small island destinations undergoing tourism structuring, domestic tourism, particularly through disorderly residential mobility, may generate localized forms of saturation, independently of growth in international arrivals. This internal dimension of overtourism remains underexplored.

This internal origin raises three major issues. First, how can overtourism be analyzed without relying on conventional indicators based on incoming flows ? Second, what are the effects of domestic overtourism when residents are both generators and victims ? Third, how can emerging destinations anticipate and regulate this latent form of tourism pressure before it becomes established ?

To address these questions, this research proposes an analytical model grounded in the well-being economy framework and positioned within the Beyond GDP perspective. Overtourism is conceptualized not as a simple exceeding of visitor thresholds, but as a process of progressive degradation of individual and collective well-being resulting from a perceived imbalance between tourism costs and benefits. Particular attention is given to residential mobility channels likely to generate congestion, use conflicts, and environmental pressures without any increase in external flows.

Residents are considered dual economic agents, contributing to tourism while experiencing its negative externalities. The empirical field is the island of La Réunion, characterized by moderate international flows and strong internal mobility. A quantitative survey of residents is analyzed using factor analysis and structural equation modeling in order to examine the relationships between well-being, territorial attachment, perceptions, and attitudes. The expected results aim to highlight the mediating role of well-being in the early identification of perceptual saturation thresholds and to propose regulatory levers suited to island territories.

Dr. Valentina Montalto (p)

Endogenous growth theories have increasingly emphasised the importance of place-based development strategies that mobilise the distinctive assets, capabilities, and institutional arrangements of specific localities (Barca et al., 2012). Within this paradigm, the agency of local and regional actors and their ability to co-produce a shared territorial vision have emerged as central components of development trajectories (Beer & Clower, 2014; Sotarauta & Beer, 2021). This has contributed to a growing scholarly interest in the notion of place leadership, understood as the capacity of diverse actors to influence collective action in ways that align with local needs, identities, and aspirations (Collinge & Gibney, 2010; Beer et al., 2019).
Parallel to this shift, many territories have pursued culture-led development strategies (Sacco et al., 2014). These typically involve the symbolic and productive reactivation of context-specific heritage assets and know-how to revitalise local economies, enhance territorial identity, and reposition places within urban hierarchies (Pratt, 2009; Scott, 2010). Global initiatives such as the UNESCO Creative Cities Network and the expanding World Crafts Cities programme further reflect a growing policy interest in specific cultural domains to act as engines of place renewal.
Yet, while major metropolitan centres have been extensively studied, much less attention has been devoted to non-core places that increasingly seek to recover and valorise a specific cultural fields and connected know-how to interrupt trajectories of economic marginalisation (MacKinnon et al., 2022; Rodríguez-Pose, 2017). In particular, the literature has not fully addressed the role of place leadership in sustaining such forms of culture-led development.
This article addresses this gap by examining how and why culture-led development succeeds—or fails—in revitalising non-core places, with a specific focus on the role of place-based leadership and the geography of opportunities within which such strategies unfold. We adopt an explicitly process-oriented approach, asking what sequence of events and interventions shapes the re-emergence of culture-led specialisation; who exercises place leadership, and how it evolves; and what outcomes—symbolic or material—are ultimately achieved.
Empirically, the paper investigates four non-capital European cities that have experienced deep structural decline yet sought to reposition themselves by creatively re-legitimizing and re-imagining a cultural field linked to the history and economy of the place: Angoulême (comics), Antwerp (fashion), Limoges (porcelain), and Stoke-on-Trent (ceramics). The article contributes to debates on place leadership and culture-led development by demonstrating how agency interacts with temporally and spatially situated opportunity spaces, and by explaining divergent outcomes among territories with similar know-how and aspirations.

Dr. Carmela Ciccarelli (p), Prof Antonella Rita Ferrara, Prof Rosanna Nisticò

The growing relevance of multi-level governance arrangements and the expanding role of local authorities in the implementation of public policies has given increasing prominence to the analyses conducted at the municipal-level. This is particularly evident in the context of post–Covid-19 recovery plans under the Next Generation EU programme, as well as in recent place-based development strategies that explicitly build on municipal characteristics, such as the National Strategy for Inner Areas introduced in Italy during the 2014–2020 programming period of the EU cohesion policy.
The availability of fine-grained, municipal-level indicators is therefore crucial for both ex-ante policy design and ex-post evaluation. Despite the ultimate objective of public development policy being the enhancement of territorial and people well-being, systematic measures of socio-economic progress at the local level remain limited, especially with respect to their inherently multidimensional nature, widely emphasised in the “beyond GDP” literature.
This paper defines the Municipal Well-being Index (MWBI), a synthetic measure of socio-economic progress for Italian municipalities, computed over the period 2018–2022 using an original dataset gathered from Istat. The MWBI is constructed by aggregating composite sub-indices across eight dimensions of quality of life: demographic profile; cultural and natural attractiveness; inclusiveness and employment stability; human capital; productive structure and entrepreneurship; material living conditions; essential public services; and labour market participation. Each dimension aggregates information extracted from multiple variables that are selected according to the existing literature and validated through multivariate statistical analysis.
The synthetic indicators are constructed by combining several statistical aggregation methods, including Principal Component Analysis, the Adjusted Mazziotta-Pareto Index (AMPI) method, and non-compensatory approaches commonly adopted in applied regional analysis. The results reveal substantial heterogeneity in well-being across municipalities, extending beyond traditional “vertical” dichotomies (e.g. North–South, urban–rural, mountains–flat areas) and uncovering significant “horizontal” disparities within groups of municipalities belonging to the same category.
This lays the groundwork for further empirical analyses exploiting the MWBI to investigate territorial inequalities at a more local scale, within the context of a recent place-based policy.

Ms Maria Astrid Kuntjara (p), Ronald L Holzhacker, Johan Woltjer

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are globally used economic development instruments, based on exceptional regulations and institutions. They are widely criticised for operating as enclaves, while research emphasises that SEZ outcomes depend on how zones are embedded in host regions’ conditions. The complexity of SEZs' enclave features and the need for integration with host-region conditions highlight the need to move beyond treating SEZs as isolated enclaves or embedded development instruments. Under the SDG agenda, SEZs need to not only attract investment but also support inclusive and territorially integrated development, particularly through SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth) and SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities). Tourism SEZs offer an interesting analytical case because tourism depends on place-specific assets and reshapes local labour markets, services, and land use.

This paper examines how enclave and embeddedness logics are configured from the national SEZ regulatory framework to local implementation in a tourism SEZ context, using Mandalika (Indonesia) as a case. We adopt a place-based approach and operationalise enclave-embeddedness logic across 3 dimensions: policy alignment, institutional relationships, and spatial-economic linkages; through a two-level qualitative design combining document analysis of national and regional SEZ regulations with interviews, Q-methodology (stakeholder Q-sorts), and field observation in Mandalika to capture formal design and implementation practices.

Findings show that Indonesia's SEZ regulatory framework provides an adaptive umbrella combining national steering with space for local conditions. At the local level, enclave and embeddedness logics coexist but are unevenly configured across dimensions: policy alignment is strong at national and sectoral (tourism) but conditional at subnational levels; institutional arrangements retain enclave features alongside coordination that is strongest with national and grassroots actors but episodic with subnational actors; spatial–economic linkages show strong functional connectivity yet unstable in spatial governance. Q-method results indicate a shared rejection of the enclave model but competing priorities of embeddedness; one viewpoint prioritises spatial economic integration, while another prioritises institutional coordination and local inclusion. Major events in Mandalika create temporal pulses that temporarily accelerate embeddedness.

The paper contributes to SEZ-SDG debates by showing that SDG alignment in tourism SEZs depends on how multidimensional and contested embeddedness is translated from formal regulatory design to local practice, offering lessons for SEZs in decentralised developing countries.