Call for Chapters: Advanced Approaches for Policy and Governance in Strategic Tourism Decision Making

Tourism has entered an era where strategic decision-making has become both more urgent and more complex. The sector's trajectory is no longer dictated solely by isolated demand cycles, infrastructure capacities, or market positioning. Instead, it is increasingly conditioned by systemic and interdependent pressures unfolding across volatile economic, socio-technological, and socio-ecological landscapes. As a result, decisions concerning tourism development, investment, mobility, and community well-being must be made in environments characterized by persistent uncertainty and potentially high costs of delayed action.

This changing landscape exposes the structural limitations of conventional tourism planning and governance frameworks. While modern destinations and tourism organizations often possess a wealth of indicators, predictive forecasts, and sophisticated data infrastructures, the presence of data does not inherently yield optimized outcomes. The critical bottleneck is rarely information scarcity; rather, it is the analytical capacity and institutional coordination required to translate data into timely, legitimate action. A central scholarly and practical challenge therefore lies in understanding how evidence is interpreted under pressure, how competing alternatives are weighted, how systemic risks are anticipated, and how policy trade-offs are negotiated within adaptive governance structures.

Strategic decision-making in tourism should therefore be re-conceptualized not as a merely mechanical, technical exercise or a narrow managerial function, but as a dynamic governance capability. Advancing this capability demands an integration of theoretical rigor, methodological innovation, and contextual judgment. It also requires a deliberate, interdisciplinary dialogue, drawing on breakthroughs in the decision sciences, public policy, systems thinking, advanced data analytics, and sustainability transitions.

This edited volume, Advanced Approaches for Policy and Governance in Strategic Tourism Decision Making, aims to advance this agenda. We invite high-quality chapters that examine how tourism decisions can be better framed, supported, modeled, implemented, and evaluated within complex environments. The volume seeks contributions that move beyond descriptive accounts of tourism challenges and offer theoretically grounded, methodologically transparent, and policy-relevant frameworks, models, tools, or empirical applications. Our ultimate ambition is to provide a rigorous reference work that strengthens the analytical and governance foundations of contemporary tourism strategy.

The objective of this book is to provide a high-level interdisciplinary reference work on advanced approaches to strategic tourism decision making, with a particular emphasis on policy and governance. The volume aims to consolidate and extend current debates on tourism intelligence, evidence-based governance, analytical modelling and simulation, decision-support systems, strategic foresight, and practical policy implementation.

Specifically, the book seeks to:

• Advance tourism decision making as a strategic and methodological field in its own right.
• Integrate theoretical perspectives from tourism governance, decision sciences, public policy, economics, management, sustainability studies, and complexity science.
• Present advanced methodologies and analytical tools that support decision making in tourism systems.
• Examine how data, artificial intelligence, forecasting, simulation, spatial analytics, dashboards, digital twins, and multicriteria approaches can inform policy and governance.
• Provide empirically grounded applications, case studies, and comparative analyses from destinations, regions, cities, DMOs, smart destination initiatives, tourism observatories, and public institutions.
• Encourage contributions that move beyond descriptive diagnosis toward actionable decision frameworks, policy learning, institutional coordination, and measurable governance outcomes.

The editors are particularly interested in contributions that connect conceptual rigour with operational relevance. Chapters should not merely describe tourism problems, but should clarify how decisions are made, how alternatives are evaluated, how uncertainty is handled, how evidence is translated into policy, and how governance actors can improve strategic action in tourism systems.

This book is intended for a broad but specialized audience involved in tourism governance, policy design, strategic management, tourism intelligence, and decision-support systems.

The academic audience includes scholars, researchers, doctoral students, and postgraduate students working in tourism studies, tourism economics, destination governance, hospitality and tourism management, smart tourism, public policy, sustainability, urban and regional studies, data science, artificial intelligence, and complex systems.

The policy and governance audience includes policymakers, public administrators, destination management organizations, tourism observatories, smart destination managers, regional and local tourism authorities, planning agencies, and institutions responsible for tourism strategy, sustainability, competitiveness, resilience, and territorial development.

The professional audience includes tourism consultants, analysts, hospitality and tourism managers, technology providers, data governance professionals, tourism intelligence units, and organizations involved in strategic planning, monitoring, forecasting, policy evaluation, and decision-support platforms.

The book will be especially valuable for readers seeking rigorous frameworks and practical tools to improve tourism-related decision making in complex, uncertain, and data-intensive environments.

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit chapter proposals addressing, but not limited to, the following topics.

I. Theoretical Foundations and Strategic Perspectives

This section welcomes chapters that develop conceptual, theoretical, and strategic foundations for tourism decision making. Contributions may address how tourism decisions are framed, legitimized, coordinated, and evaluated in complex governance environments.

Possible topics include:

• Tourism decision-making theory
• Strategic tourism governance
• Evidence-based tourism policy
• Decision making under uncertainty in tourism
• Complexity theory and adaptive tourism systems
• Tourism resilience and crisis decision making
• Anticipatory governance in tourism
• Strategic tourism intelligence
• Institutional frameworks for tourism decision making
• Behavioural dimensions of tourism policy
• Public-private coordination in tourism governance
• Stakeholder participation and collaborative decision making
• Ethics, transparency, and accountability in tourism decisions
• Sustainable tourism governance and sustainability transitions
• Regenerative tourism and transformative destination governance
• Tourism competitiveness and strategic adaptation
• Governance of overtourism
• Governance of undertourism
• Destination life-cycle thinking and strategic decisions
• Policy evaluation frameworks in tourism
• Business, corporate, and system-level strategies in tourism and hospitality
• New business models and governance implications in tourism ecosystems

II. Methodologies, Models, and Decision-Support Tools

This section focuses on analytical approaches, methodological innovations, and decision-support tools that can improve the quality, robustness, transparency, and timeliness of tourism decisions.

Possible topics include:

• Tourism forecasting methodologies
• Tourism demand modelling
• Big data analytics for tourism decisions
• Artificial intelligence in tourism governance
• Machine learning applications for destination management
• Predictive analytics for tourism policy
• GIS and spatial decision systems
• Tourism dashboards and observatories
• Smart destination decision systems
• Decision-support systems for DMOs
• Multicriteria decision analysis in tourism
• Scenario planning and strategic foresight for destinations
• System dynamics models for tourism governance
• Agent-based modelling in tourism systems
• Simulation models for destination policy
• Digital twins for tourism destinations
• Network analysis and tourism systems
• Sentiment analysis and social media intelligence
• Data visualization and tourism intelligence platforms
• Tourism indicators and monitoring systems
• Data governance in tourism
• Climate risk analytics for tourism destinations
• Early-warning systems and anticipatory monitoring
• Policy experimentation and simulation-based governance
• Methodological frameworks for evaluating tourism policy alternatives

III. Applications, Case Studies, and Policy Implementation

This section invites empirical, applied, and practice-oriented chapters showing how strategic decision-making frameworks, analytical tools, governance models, and decision-support systems are implemented in real tourism contexts.

Possible topics include:

• Smart tourism destination governance
• Tourism observatories and intelligence systems
• AI-supported tourism policy design
• Evidence-based tourism policy applications
• Overtourism monitoring and management systems
• Undertourism and destination revitalization strategies
• Crisis management decision frameworks
• Tourism management during disruptive events
• Destination resilience planning
• Regional tourism intelligence systems
• Urban tourism governance applications
• Island destination governance
• Sustainable mobility decisions in tourism
• Climate adaptation decisions in tourism destinations
• Community participation in tourism governance
• Real-time tourism monitoring systems
• Destination competitiveness analytics
• Applications of digital twins in destinations
• Data-driven policy implementation in smart destinations
• Case studies on tourism dashboards and observatories
• Comparative studies of destination governance models
• Policy learning and institutional innovation in tourism
• Practical applications of multicriteria, simulation, GIS, AI, or forecasting tools

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before July 5, 2026, a chapter proposal of 1,000 to 2,000 words clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors will be notified by July 19, 2026 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines.Full chapters of a minimum of 10,000 words (word count includes references and related readings) are expected to be submitted by September 27, 2026, and all interested authors must consult the guidelines for manuscript submissions at https://www.igi-global.com/publish/contributor-resources/before-you-write/ prior to submission. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-anonymized review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Note: There are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to this book publication, Advanced Approaches for Policy and Governance in Strategic Tourism Decision Making. All manuscripts are accepted based on a double-anonymized peer review editorial process.

All proposals should be submitted through the eEditorial Discovery^® online submission manager.

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global Scientific Publishing, an international academic publisher of the "Information Science Reference", "Medical Information Science Reference", "Business Science Reference", and "Engineering Science Reference" imprints. IGI Global Scientific Publishing specializes in publishing reference books, scholarly journals, and electronic databases featuring academic research on a variety of innovative topic areas including, but not limited to, education, social science, medicine and healthcare, business and management, information science and technology, engineering, public administration, library and information science, media and communication studies, and environmental science. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit https://www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2027.

July 5, 2026: Proposal Submission Deadline
July 19, 2026: Notification of Acceptance
September 27, 2026: Full Chapter Submission
November 8, 2026: Review Results Returned
December 6, 2026: Final Acceptance Notification
December 13, 2026: Final Chapter Submission

Prof. Francisco J. Navarro-Meneses
Universidad Nebrija
fnavarro@nebrija.es

Prof. Valentina Della Corte
Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
valentina.dellacorte@unina.it