Sustainable Tourism as a Mean for Inclusive Development? A Textual Analysis of Funded Projects in Greece

Tourism is a prominent economic sector, and one of the most relevant industries in several European Countries, especially in the southern Area. With growing emphasis on sustainability not only from an ecological and economical point of view, but also with a special care on inequalities and inclusion, recent European policies prioritize addressing inequalities alongside traditional growth objectives. Europe’s commitment towards achieving balanced regional development, understanding the impact of tourism on marginalized groups becomes increasingly important. Leveraging literature reviews and European recommendations, this presentation addresses the question on how the touristic industry can contribute to attaining this balance, and understanding if tourism led development is working primarily as a mechanism for wealth accumulation or inequality reduction. Within this context, focusing on Greece for the prominence of the touristic industry over the country’s economy, we analyzed numerous projects funded under the EU Cohesion Policy during 2014-2020, seeking insights into their underlying goals and expected outcomes.The corpus is composed of projects implemented in Greece, retrieved from the European Platform Kohesio (51.129 projects, 10.893.636 word tokens). We initiated our examination first through a word embedding conversion and topic modeling procedure with BERTopic. The project abstracts, converted to embeddings using SentenceTransformers and bge-small-en model, underwent through a dimensionality reduction procedure using UMAP, resulting in 141 topics. The topics are then explored, first isolating those projects centering around tourism and then examining their connection with project goals enhancing essential capabilities such as education, health, and income generation. Following this, we used the open source large language model Mistral-7b to extract and categorize the specific project targets. While initial observations suggest that tourism occupies a central position within Greek development projects, deeper scrutiny reveals that touristic development is working mainly in terms of infrastructure advancements. The analysis opens questions on how policymakers should thus consider revisiting existing frameworks and ensuring synergy between broad tourism agendas and concrete actions focused on promoting inclusive development strengthening key human capacities. The main focusing points of the discussion will be on the methods implied (especially for what concerns the document filtering procedure), as well as the applicative implications of the study.