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The paper titled “DETERMINE: A multiphase iterative meta-framework for teaching sustainable spatial planning of tourism destinations”, summarising and further developing the pedagogical and planning achievements of SPOT, has now been published in the Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education.
What happens to a project after the project ends?
SPOT – Sustainable Spatial Planning of Tourism Destinations – officially ended in 2022. However, the completion of the Erasmus+ project did not bring an end to the discussions, ideas and methodological developments initiated through our collaboration. Some of them continued to evolve long after the formal project activities had been completed.
Taking sustainability seriously also means taking education seriously
SPOT was built around a relatively simple idea: if we take sustainability seriously, we also need to take seriously how we teach it. Sustainable spatial planning of tourism destinations is inherently complex. Tourism development interacts with environmental, social, cultural and economic processes, while planning decisions involve different actors, interests and spatial scales. For this reason, sustainable spatial planning cannot be taught only through textbooks, theoretical models or ready-made solutions.
Instead, students need opportunities to engage with real places, real problems and real stakeholders. They need to become active participants in the learning process, applying planning methods to actual destination challenges, confronting theoretical knowledge with local realities and discussing possible solutions with the people affected by them.
This principle shaped the SPOT teaching activities. Three intensive study visits were organised in different tourism contexts: Kızkalesi in Turkey, where students addressed heritage tourism and the challenges of mass and seasonal tourism; Peniche in Portugal, where the focus was on coastal development, tourism pressures and competing local interests; and Langhe-Roero and Monferrato in Italy, where students explored the complexity of sustainable development in a UNESCO-listed wine tourism region. Across these cases, students worked with methods including stakeholder analysis, GIS, SWOT analysis, scenario building and the formulation of policy recommendations.
From SPOT to DETERMINE
The experiences gathered during these activities taught us another important lesson: there is probably no final, perfect method for teaching complex sustainability challenges. Different destinations pose different problems. Student groups differ in their knowledge, skills and experiences. Local stakeholders bring different perspectives to the discussion. Methods that work particularly well in one context may need to be modified when transferred to another. Rather than treating this variability as a weakness, we began to understand it as an opportunity for systematic improvement.
The underlying principle is straightforward: design a method, apply it in a real-world context, evaluate what worked and what did not, learn from students, colleagues and stakeholders, and redesign it. Then do it again, and again. This is the idea behind DETERMINE – an iterative approach to designing, testing, evaluating and refining both the pedagogical methods we use and the planning methods we teach.
The process combines three main stages. Teachers first brainstorm and (re)design the methods to be applied. These methods are then tested through study visits and engagement with real planning problems. Finally, focus groups with participating students provide feedback that contributes to evaluation and further refinement. The results of one iteration therefore become an input into the next.
Importantly, this concerns two interconnected dimensions of education. The first is how we teach – the pedagogical methods through which students learn. The second is what we teach – the planning methods and tools students use to understand and address sustainability challenges. DETERMINE treats both dimensions as open to incremental improvement.
DETERMINE – An idea that continued after SPOT
The formal completion of SPOT in 2022 did not close this process. On the contrary, reflecting on what worked, what could be improved and how the experiences from the three study visits could be conceptualised more broadly continued after the project. Almost four years later, this reflection has resulted in the publication of our paper on DETERMINE in the Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education.
The paper discusses the incremental consolidation of the approach through the successive SPOT experiences and, importantly, treats DETERMINE as an open-ended process. Further iterations may incorporate new methods, respond to new educational contexts and address additional dimensions of sustainable spatial planning. In the paper, we therefore also consider possible future integrations, including multi-level spatiotemporal analysis, economic appraisal and further development of scenario-building approaches.
In this sense, the publication is not simply a summary of a completed Erasmus+ project. It demonstrates how the experiences and collaborations developed within a project can continue generating new ideas after its formal completion. Until 21 October 2026, the paper is freely available to everyone. Use this LINK.
