Social Innovation in Tourism for the Inner Areas: Desire, Mirage or Nightmare?

Various case studies within the scientific literature have examined and documented social innovation
initiatives aimed at providing a differentiated model for tourism development, particularly in the 'inner'
and 'left-behind' areas. These regions, due to their geographical and socio-economic characteristics,
have experienced and continue to face challenges such as depopulation, unemployment, and
degradation. In these areas, tourism development is often presented as the only possible way-out and
solution for regeneration.
The contribution desires to discuss theoretically some interesting findings of a recent systematic
literature review regarding the topic of social innovation in tourism in which 65 papers were collected,
starting from 2007 until 2023. In this review, ten papers dealt with cases-study of South Europe’s inner
areas (Italy, France, Portugal and Spain) discussing different social innovation initiatives related to
tourism, such as rural tourism and eco-tourism (Chiodo, 2019; Belliggiano et al., 2021), communitybased
tourism (Malek & Costa, 2015; Martini et al. 2017; Borgnet, 2019; Borgnet & Le Touzè, 2021)
and tourism based on cultural heritage (Yago et al., 2018; Moleiro, 2021; Splendiani et al., 2022). It is
rather interesting to note that the South and Mediterranean Europe is currently the area reporting the
majority of social innovation practices regarding inner areas, at least according to academic literature.
These areas present similar characteristics: they belong to countries in which tourism is one of the most
important sectors for the national GDP.
Various scholars have highlighted the potential risks associated with tourism development and the
eventual consequences at the local level and for the community (Semi & Tonetta, 2021; Tulumello &
Allegretti, 2021; Bolzoni & Semi, 2023). Very often those risks are related to development as a trigger
of gentrification (Glass, 1964) and expulsion of the native inhabitants for the accommodation of
tourists. Expanding the concept in the last years, scholars have argued about gentrification not only in
urban areas but also in rural and inner territories (Parsons, 1980; Solana-Solana, 2010; Alonso González, 2017; Lu et al., 2022). This rural gentrification phenomenon is very often related to tourism creating, a tourism-driven rural gentrification (Xu et al., 2021; Ma et al. 2024).
In this document, we explore under which conditions social innovations constitute a strategy to balance
tourist development and social equity in the inner areas presented in the selected papers; therefore, it is
a predominantly theoretically-grounded & empirically-based paper. So the goal of the paper is to
understand whether social innovation initiatives are capable of triggering sustainable tourism models,
starting from these initiatives, related to inner areas, already registered in literature.