Sustainable Tourism Law

THE PATH TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 765 From this viewpoint, tourism is related to four subsystems: • Natural subsystem : it refers to the group of natural resources that, once they are inside the complex tourismsystem, maybecome tourist attractions. • Socio-economic subsystem : it refers to the combination of economic and socio-cultural factors that are part of the tourism activity and support it through its actors . • Productive subsystem : it refers especially to the production structure of the tourism sector: businessmen, infrastructure and offer and demand conditions. • Political-administrative subsystem that explains the statutory intervention and governmental management. Tourism is then an element that is part of several subsystems and its full development shall be based on the harmonic relationship among the subsystems so that the tourismactivity is sustainable and constitutes a genuine opportunity for local, regional and national developments. Sustainable is an adjective for development (for the case of tourism). Although sustainable development is a goal, almost a utopia, as it implies to walk “towards”, it is dynamic, it gets updated by increasing or decreasing, at each stage; such walk shall include all the elements before mentioned articulated even with different degrees of development in order to guarantee “the good path” of the process initiated. For such purposes, the development processes are shown not with an ascending line but with a helicoidal one which, at each stage, changes its settings with new characterizing elements.