FINAL HANDBOOK Within the UST project different partners started with different perspectives on sustainability, some leaning towards social issues of community, some leaning toward green initiatives. The one of the main goals of the project was to develop and utilize a selfassessment questionnaire designed to assess and understand the work of municipalities in the field of sustainable tourism development in a non-prescriptive way. This meant giving guidance to thinking about sustainability without having to rely on a single framework – a one size fits all – that would hinder learning rather than promote it. Prescriptive frameworks for sustainability often have a destination perspective rather than a municipal perspective. By using the full set of SDGs, the self-assessment questionnaire helps identify good practices, areas of improvement and blind spots from each municipality’s unique situation while acknowledging the greater SDG framework that many all municipal governance has a relationship to. The overarching aim is to use the self-assessment questionnaires to pinpoint upskilling opportunities for the stakeholders in each of the partner municipalities and make the framework available for others to use by creating clear policy and strategy changes that promotes actions with a high degree of organisational and situational fit. How the SDGs have been interpreted in the project With different lenses and different context for sustainability as well as for tourism the partners set out on a journey to define common denominators for self-reflection and selfassessment. With the broader scope the municipalities involved their stakeholders to use local good practices to design stakeholder dialogue around sustainable tourism. The result is the self-assessment questionnaire. It is not designed to be prescriptive, as that is not the intention of the SDGs, but to inspire local action, policies and initiatives. Each SDG was given a broad definition to inspire conversation. Building on that, the selfassessment applies a methodology that allows municipalities to evaluate their communal understanding and identify gaps to address. Through this process the partner municipalities and their stakeholders gained a much deeper understanding of sustainable practices and with the framework in place it's easy to identify exactly what aspect or nuance of an SDG you want to focus on developing. The self-assessment framework gives you this broader understanding to develop with your own stakeholders. This will create a set of sustainability results that are unique to you but where comparability makes benchmarking easier. This approach captures the triple-bottom-line that all partner municipalities were searching for but through stakeholder engagement they added a fourth pillar: good governance. How to work with sustainability and stakeholders A destination has a multitude of different stakeholders from governance actors like a municipality or a regional body to small businesses and associations of not-for-profit actors. Sustainability work has the ambition to include all of these stakeholders in the conversation about sustainable tourism and its contribution to the SDGs. 15
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