4. Results

The collaborative group

 

The research path was tackled with an interdisciplinary analysis which showed interrela-tionships between social and managerial, psychological and geographical, political and cultural studies. The interdisciplinary approach has made it possible to narrate the territo-rial identities and experiences, the organizational needs based on the idea of a governance that relaunches cooperation and collaboration between public and private, in which the leadership must be assumed by the DMO—Destination Management Organization.

Even if it was a research space built on the triple helix system (scientific community, organizations and public institutions) the real protagonists were the tourism operators and their practices.

In this work the narratives offered contexts through which a group of people (social actors) worked together to find cohesion, balance, team spirit and collective identity.

Collaborative storytelling is to be understood as organizational change. What does this mean?

The group has not only given itself the possibility of making visible what is contained in each other’s experiences, but also of creating something and achieving a common goal.

The stories narrated, those representative of political, organizational, cultural dimen-sions, are not without biographical elements, conflicts and memories and it is precisely this authentic characteristic that has made it possible to:

 

Bring out the contributions of each individual;

Enhance openness of people and practices;

Achieve goals and share results;

Focus on the speed of decision-making power;

Establish relationships.

 

The collaborative group was managed according to a 5-step process called the 5 Rs of productive meetings of Starhawk (2011) which gave the various operators of different lev-els of expertise the opportunity to deal with each other in a completely fair way, eliminat-ing the hierarchical.

The 5 Rs of the productive meetings that allowed to organize the group’s activities were:

 

Right People—it refers to people, it represents who is part of the group;

Right Container—it refers to the frame, the setting, it represents how the meeting is structured in terms of space and duration. It is a sort of metaphor for the social order.

Right process—it refers to the ways in which a group can operate. A group can operate in terms of open space or consensus building. Open space provides an opportunity to discuss and generate ideas, but not to make decisions or set priorities. The latter ones are decided in the process of building consensus, even if for the research group it is more correct to say that it was an operational confrontation, i.e. co-creation.

Right Facilitation—it refers to the consent facilitator, in this case the facilitator was represented by various figures operating in the research field: the scientific referent and the research fellow assisted by the support of the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Calabria, which in fact have set up spaces and contents for comparison.

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Right Agenda—it refers to the agenda necessary for structuring spaces, interventions, for selecting critical issues and potentials to discuss.

 

The purpose of the group was to activate a pro-social process aimed at creating a sense of us with respect to the interests of the individual. In other words, cooperate to create a collective us.

Each member knowingly sacrificed himself by giving up a certain amount of power to achieve mutual benefit.

Thus, the vision initiated the activities of the group.

The vision represents the image of the world that one wants to create. A well-framed vision increases creativity, passion and interests. Above all, a vision embodies values that allow (tourism operators) to accept challenges and face them.

It is precisely those shared values which, by becoming a bond, lead to conceptualiz-ing the vision at a higher and more spiritual level, I would add.

For the analysed group, it all started with an intention:

 

More centered than a general vision;

Wider than a purpose.

 

An intention projected towards the change that was able to:

 

Share a common vision of tourism;

Stimulate the co-planning;

Create forms of collaboration to promote territorial governance aimed at managing the planning of an integrated tourist offer.

 

The collaborative group highlights elements of a starfish organisation (Brafman and Beckstrom, 2008):

 

The group was not hierarchically structured, rather it was structured as a circle;

The group was made up of peers;

In the group there was an absence of a formal authority, and finally

The group’s actions created as a collective result the activation of a common vision which incorporates all the values of the group aimed at creating a bond.

 

Each social actor involved in the analysis made it possible to photograph a part of the (mature or in the process of being implemented) tourism reality. Through the narrative of their experiences and practices they have made explicit what I have called coordi-nates of the goodness of the experience, that is to say they have allowed us to identify in the areas of reference:

 

Purely experiential practices,

Building processes of territorial organizations,

Actors who support experientiality through services.

 

The purely experiential practices include those which not only experiment, but which validate the idea of tourist as local and temporary citizen which refer to the delicate concept of an enlarged community, those practices which, as Curti (2021) writes, lead

 

the tourist to “a drastic change from visiting to feeling part of living”. These experi-ences are aimed above all at protecting the place and its identity by not altering its spirit and essence. The purpose of these experiences is not to lose the authenticity of the place in the mechanisms of mass tourism.

The collaborative group has highlighted that a new tourism policy must be character-ized by a series of elements in order to pass from a theoretical dimension, made up of statements, to one of implementation and realization. Elements that allow change are: (a) the activation and management of organizational change, (b) the development of networks of organizations, (c) territorial strategic planning which aims to create sharing and consen-sus on long-term programs of change on a territory and generates forms of participatory governance (Perulli 2004). The change in experience design requires advanced models for managing complexity. The tourist experience is a continuous process, without interrup-tions, and it must be designed from a systemic perspective.

The change therefore takes place, if one conceives, realizes and implements a:

 

Multilevel planning, to promote cooperation between institutions, businesses and peo-ple for transformation;

Participation and enablement of stakeholders in planning, innovation and change.

 

It was a research in which daimons were implicitly and explicitly spoken of, especially tourism daimons, in the context of the genius loci, that is, that model of life inscribed in our soul that is shared and which responds to a certain spirituality present in the places. In terms of community, that inner will of cultivating and implementing every day with coherence and courage the vocation of a small village, of a green area that goes beyond the human need to personify spaces and objects. Vocation understood as heritage, as authenticity.

The analysis of experiential tourism that emerged from the narratives highlights that it is increasingly becoming an option of choice after the covid-19 pandemic. A tourism that focuses attention on small destinations and that leads the tourist to experience the holi-day rather than spend it. It is a tourism that would attract the attention of the international dimension.

Calabria suffers the effects of a long legal-administrative history of seaside tourism justified by the fact that it has over 700 km of coastline, representing in fact the Italian region with the maximum coastal development (Fera and Ziparo 2014). Calabria is a predominantly mountainous area even if it is perceived essentially for its coastal strip. The tourist offer and communication was focused almost exclusively on the sea product, activating projects located most of the time on the coasts and absorbing growth prospects from the more inland areas, showing a very high seasonality of the seaside tourist flow, mainly in the summer months. The Calabrian tourism system presents typical elements of a spontaneous tourism development model, which is born. Around an easily exploitable natural attractive resource. Despite this, companies have been able, over the years, to offer only the minimum accessory services and exploitation of the marine resource (Mammì and Utizi 2017). Furthermore, the weak urban structure has affected the quality of services and infrastructures. (Fera and Ziparo 2014). The maturity of the seaside sector combined with the diffusion of a different motivation for travel than that of the sea has led to reconsidering other Calabrian resources. The Region is full of villages, green areas and rural areas ( the region is the only one in Italy that has three national parks on its territory) that must be read and analyzed in terms of relationship systems that promote changes in ecological and sustainable behaviors both from an information point of view, i.e. to increase knowledge

 

and awareness, and from a structural point of view, i.e. changing the circumstances in which decision-making behaviors are implemented.

What emerged in the various meetings was the step-by-step construction of a willing-ness to make a commitment to change behavior and to shift the importance of the tourism sector towards new forms of development, even if niche ones capable of soliciting sub-sidiarity horizontal. The new intent of the subjects of the Calabrian tourist offer is to go beyond the seaside and to build an undertourism destination, in other words that is not only characterized by a mechanism based on consumption, but centered on people and their places.

Authentic Calabria has much beyond the sea and fully satisfies the new demand for post-pandemic tourism that seeks the healthiness of places, non-crowding, the search for experiences rather than unique places, the possibility of living outdoors.

The Calabrians must realize that they are "authentic citizens" of an authentic region and not of a pre-established tourist product. This awareness must also be supported through a specific marketing action that no longer tells the story of Calabria but of the many authen-tic Calabrias with widespread stories. (Regione Calabria, 2023).

The collaborative group has allowed their stories to narrate tourism politics through evidence.

Policy is not something without stories, on the contrary it produces arguments capable of distinguishing good rhetoric from bad and of communicating the evidence.

Evidence assumes the fundamental role of persuading within a certain topic. Thus, nar-rative is constitutive of the political process and it is for this reason that evidence-based policy making is believed to have become the dominant paradigm.

The narrative is important in the policy making process for several reasons:

 

Because it brings value,

Because stories reflect or constitute identities,

Because it holds the keys to the agency,

Because when stories become institutionalized they contribute to political stability,

Because it is a resource of power,

Because narratives provide an intervention point in the decision-making process.

 

Narrative operates within politics in different ways and allows us to establish a frame-work for considering interventions (Lowndes 2016).

Starting from the work of Dodge et al. (2005) narrative can be distinguished in:

 

Narrative as knowledge,

Narrative as meaning,

Narrative as a metaphor.

 

Narrative as knowledge, write Dodge et al. (2005) is “seen as a way of knowing”. In other words, social actors think and learn through stories, as narratives are seen as contain-ers of knowledge.

Narrative as meaning is seen as a means of expression (Dodge et al. 2005). Social actors create and use stories to communicate meaning and reveal their own meaning-making processes.

Fiction as metaphor is seen as constituting, shaping human beings and not simply as a means to be used by them. Through fiction, deep social structures are glimpsed that are not visible to the naked eye.

 

The collaborative group reproduced a capable narrative within the three types of nar-rative discussed by Dodge et. al. (2005).

Experiential tourism has been presented by narratives and social actors experience as a phenomenon capable of going from the experience of the village to the luxury one, passing through mulberry and silkworm cultivation and the anthropological approach of a small town that is transformed into a laboratory of tradition. To experience the place along a journey (in connection with nature) by bicycle, to enter empathetically into the narration of a tourist guide, or to be an active part of the processing of a product such as oil and wine.

The interpretation key with which the various meetings were addressed, after the moti-vational explanation and the genius loci, was the tourism governance activity, a governance activity conceived as a system of relationships between organizations and institutions.

 

 

The practical reflections of the group

 

From the areas of reflection in which the group worked, various k-concepts and actions emerged which best represent the strengths of a new way of relating to tourism, but also the critical issues of the old logic of tourism which no longer respond to the needs of the new trend.

The reflections were:

 

Greater enhancement of inland areas, villages and green areas penalized by a sup-port policy biased in favor of seaside tourism;

Creation of experiential paths to be introduced in the national and international circuit;

A co-constructed integrated tourist offer able to deseasonalize and that it takes into accounthe natural cyclicality of the individual experiences to be proposed;

A territorial organization which takes account of local specificities, which does not divide up the territory, but which knows how to integrate it;

A tourist practice focused less towards structures and more focused towards services characterized by effective tools of storyliving;

An experiential tourism observatory, created, organized and supervised in the aca-demic field by tourism scholars, which supports operators and bodies in territorial planning with updated studies and analyses;

Continuous monitoring of the operators with the possibility to interact with the aca-demic world;

A major streamlining of the access processes to the opportunities set up by the regional and European calls;

Reactivate regulatory procedures that facilitate the establishment of regional tourist districts;

Enhance the lines of mobility both within the region and towards the region in order to facilitate vacation planning and travel;

Reinforce the digital aspect of experiential tourism;

A greater effort by the tourism categories to standardize structures and services towards sustainability, innovation and competitiveness;

Preparation of specific permanent training courses on Experiential Tourism Operators;

Need for a Framework Law on Tourism in Calabria which frames, regulates and sup-portshospitality, guides, productive integration.

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This idea of the Calabrian tourist offer becomes even more specific if we take into account the direction promoted by the collaborative group: the promotion of experiential itineraries.

There are 5 steps identified for the promotion of experiential itineraries (new or redevel-opment of existing ones):

 

Explicit the territorial vocation through the census of resources and experiential prac-tices to evaluate the potential;

Select and organize experiences in themes to converge in the Calabrian tourist offer system;

Listening to the market, i.e. understanding the tourist demand and identify the target;

Create attraction, ie activate image construction processes to stimulate curiosity;

Design itineraries as a tangible trace of the experience.