2025/02/17 by Carolina García, Christof Pforr, Michael Volgger · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research #Sport and Mega-Event Impacts #Urban Transport and Accessibility
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/14616688.2025.2493336
openalex publication_date 2025/02/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
There have been repeated calls from practitioners and academics to make greater use of evidence to improve policymaking. While the tourism and geography literature have occasionally addressed the complex nature of research-practice collaboration, these attempts remain fragmented, somewhat unreflective and scarcely informed by debates in political science. This conceptual paper addresses this gap by identifying tensions in the mainstream literature on evidence-based policymaking and by proposing a future research roadmap for evidence-informed policymaking in tourism. The proposed research agenda stems from four tensions identified in the literature: (i) a lack of consensus on what constitutes evidence, (ii) different understandings of the policymaking process, (iii) the contradiction between evidence and policymaking, and (iv) the politics of evidence and barriers to evidence use. The paper makes several contributions to the discourse on evidence-informed policymaking in tourism geographies. It provides insights from political science discourses to aid our understanding of evidence informed policymaking which will also inform future tourism research. Moreover, the paper explores broader conceptualisations of evidence and examines various forms of its application. It also promotes awareness of diverse philosophical perspectives and emphasises that the effective use of evidence is crucial for achieving evidence-informed policymaking.