Social Innovation in Tourism for the Inner Areas: Desire, Mirage or Nightmare?

Various case studies within the scientific literature have examined and documented social innovation initiatives aimed at providing a differentiated model for tourism development, particularly in the 'inner' and 'left-behind' areas. These regions, due to their geographical and socio-economic characteristics, have experienced and continue to face challenges such as depopulation, unemployment, and degradation. In these areas, tourism development is often presented as the only possible way-out and solution for regeneration. The contribution desires to discuss theoretically some interesting findings of a recent systematic literature review regarding the topic of social innovation in tourism in which 65 papers were collected, starting from 2007 until 2023. In this review, ten papers dealt with cases-study of South Europe’s inner areas (Italy, France, Portugal and Spain) discussing different social innovation initiatives related to tourism, such as rural tourism and eco-tourism (Chiodo, 2019; Belliggiano et al., 2021), communitybased tourism (Malek & Costa, 2015; Martini et al. 2017; Borgnet, 2019; Borgnet & Le Touzè, 2021) and tourism based on cultural heritage (Yago et al., 2018; Moleiro, 2021; Splendiani et al., 2022). It is rather interesting to note that the South and Mediterranean Europe is currently the area reporting the majority of social innovation practices regarding inner areas, at least according to academic literature. These areas present similar characteristics: they belong to countries in which tourism is one of the most important sectors for the national GDP. Various scholars have highlighted the potential risks associated with tourism development and the eventual consequences at the local level and for the community (Semi & Tonetta, 2021; Tulumello & Allegretti, 2021; Bolzoni & Semi, 2023). Very often those risks are related to development as a trigger of gentrification (Glass, 1964) and expulsion of the native inhabitants for the accommodation of tourists. Expanding the concept in the last years, scholars have argued about gentrification not only in urban areas but also in rural and inner territories (Parsons, 1980; Solana-Solana, 2010; Alonso González, 2017; Lu et al., 2022). This rural gentrification phenomenon is very often related to tourism creating, a tourism-driven rural gentrification (Xu et al., 2021; Ma et al. 2024). In this document, we explore under which conditions social innovations constitute a strategy to balance tourist development and social equity in the inner areas presented in the selected papers; therefore, it is a predominantly theoretically-grounded & empirically-based paper. So the goal of the paper is to understand whether social innovation initiatives are capable of triggering sustainable tourism models, starting from these initiatives, related to inner areas, already registered in literature.