Evaluating EU regional tourism funding through a fuzzy-set analysis

Dados Bibliográficos

ID21689839
AutoresFay Klomp (Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa), Alvaro Dias (0000-0003-3560-4595, Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, autor correspondente), Álvaro Lopes Dias (0000-0003-4074-1586, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), autor correspondente)
Ano2026
Data de publicação2026-07-07
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoTourism Economics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1354-8166 • E-ISSN: 2044-0375
EditoraSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/13548166261468075
OpenAlexW7167629539
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas19

The effectiveness of EU regional development funds in tourism is widely debated, but project-level evaluations often face a methodological difficulty: publicly available evidence does not necessarily reveal actual project outcomes. This study examines the publicly observable alignment between funded project representations and the strategic objectives of Portugal’s regional Alentejo, 2020 programme. Drawing on administrative project records, official project descriptions, and project or company websites, the study applies fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to 104 explicitly identifiable tourism-related projects. The analysis reveals an uneven pattern of public alignment: economic, territorial, and market-oriented objectives are more consistently visible in project descriptions than environmental and innovation-related objectives. The findings should therefore be interpreted as evidence of how funded projects are publicly represented in relation to programme priorities, rather than as evidence of actual environmental, organizational, or economic performance

Public funding · Qualitative analysis · Qualitative comparative analysis · Regional development · Tourism · Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research · Qualitative Comparative Analysis Research · Regional Development and Policy