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Abstract

Tourism destinations face increasingly complex challenges, including overtourism in core areas, underutilisation of peripheral regions, climate pressures, and fragmented governance. Polycentric tourism offers a promising response by distributing visitor flows, decision-making, and value creation across multiple interconnected destinations. However, despite its conceptual appeal, practical mechanisms for implementing polycentric tourism strategies remain underdeveloped. This paper examines how hackathons can function as governance instruments for co-creating and operationalising polycentric tourism strategies.

Drawing on theories of polycentric governance and collaborative innovation, the paper develops a Polycentric Tourism Hackathon (PTH) framework that positions hackathons as structured arenas for distributed decision-making, collective learning, and rapid experimentation. A comparative mixed-methods approach is adopted, combining ethnographic observation, stakeholder surveys, and social network analysis across multiple hackathons delivered within the Interreg Atlantic Areas Polycentric Sustainable Tourism (POST) project. Empirical insights are drawn from flagship cases in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown (Ireland) and the Charente River corridor (France), supplemented by cross-case analysis of additional POST hackathons.

Findings indicate that hackathons can enhance inter-organisational coordination, procedural legitimacy, and implementation capacity when supported by formal stewardship structures, inclusive participation, shared data infrastructures, and post-event funding mechanisms. Prototypes generated through the hackathons addressed key polycentric objectives, including balanced spatial visitation, low-impact mobility, distributed hospitality, and circular economy initiatives. The paper contributes a theoretically grounded and empirically informed framework for translating polycentric tourism from a conceptual model into a practical governance pathway, offering actionable insights for destination managers, policymakers, and researchers.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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