Cultural heritage has an important role in sustainable development and regional resilience. It ensures employment, impacts tourism development and entrepreneurship consequently influencing increased income for the local population as well as tax revenues for the government. Further on, its role in ensuring social sustainability is seen in the social cohesion, inclusion, participation and local community well-being [
1,
2]. It may equally ensure environmental sustainability in promoting greener economy and climate adaptation as well as cultural sustainability since heritage is often featured in literature, films, music and visual arts. Its educational and scientific role is also immense as heritage is often used in (in)formal education or is a subject of various research.
It is estimated that “cultural tourism accounts for 40% of all European tourism; 4 out of 10 tourists choose their destination based on its cultural offering” [
3], and “it is safe to assume that majority of tourist attractions and destinations in the world today are based on elements of cultural heritage” [
4] (p. 3). This fact usually looks promising for cultural heritage managers since cultural tourism greatly contributes to the financial sustainability of heritage sites and to regional development. In practice, however, not all heritage sites are equally valorized. Some of them are subject to over-visitation, while others are totally deprived from visitors. Dual situation is noted:
For a long time a number of heritage interventions have been abundantly funded from different EU sources but failed to ensure sustainability, among other, due to the missing audiences; and
Tourism, although primarily contributing to heritage financial sustainability and regional economic sustainability, has become the very threat to it as over-tourism moves center-stage for some heritage sites.
Therefore, one of the main challenges in ensuring cultural heritage sustainability is its adequate management, which relates to integrated management process, from heritage product development to its interpretation. Cultural/creative industries proved to be effective on that task as they offer livability; heritage is not and should not be a static symbol of the past but is a living proof of a community identity related to their contemporary ways of living. Using architecture, arts, design, film, music, etc. may greatly enhance heritage attractiveness for the local community and visitors, thus having a direct relation with heritage audience development. On the other hand, the pre-pandemic over-tourism requires re-modelling by offering individual experiences. Cultural/creative industries again have a say in it since they offer tools for experience design.
The main assumption is, therefore, that ensuring heritage sustainability by the use of cultural/creative industries consequently also impacts development of sustainable experiential tourism and is in direct relationship with regional resilience and sustainable development.
In order to ensure heritage sustainability and ensure its impact on economy, society, environment and culture, it is necessary to develop adequate public policies, which can justify their investments in cultural heritage and stimulate development of sustainable tourism. Such policies need regular monitoring and evaluation, which is rarely performed in practice, checking their performance against the pre-set indicators. There are scarce research studies focusing on cultural heritage sustainability indicators, e.g., [
5,
6] and those relating to indicators to be used in decision-making are especially uncommon, e.g., [
2].
This short communication provides a possible conceptual framework alongside concrete indicators for cultural/creative industries’ sector impact assessment on cultural heritage and sustainable experiential tourism. They have been developed based on the Jelinčić and Tišma’s study [
5] which introduced measurement of heritage sustainability by three sets of indicators: sociocultural (covering 12 areas), environmental (3 areas) and economic sustainability (7 areas). As much as their work is well grounded, and areas well determined, the indicator sets are not all encompassing but only mentioned on the level of examples. This short communication aims to fill this gap by offering an all-encompassing indicator sets and introducing cultural/creative industries as one of the drivers for heritage sustainability. With this aim, methodology used by the Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor (CCCM) [
7] has been consulted and some of the indicator areas introduced and further developed. The work has also been complemented with desk research. Different studies have been consulted focusing on creativity indexes, e.g., [
8,
9], cultural citizenship indexes [
10], heritage sustainability indexes [
11] and tourism sustainability indicators [
12,
13]. Based on that, indicators for cultural/creative industries’ impact assessment on cultural heritage are proposed on two levels: policy level and project level. At the policy level, they potentially serve decision-makers against which policy interventions can be measured and adequately adapted, while on the project level, they serve cultural heritage managers in their daily operations potentially leading to a successful management of their cultural heritage sites.
The proposed indicator sets for cultural/creative industries’ impact assessment on cultural heritage on the policy level are divided in three main heritage areas: heritage vibrancy, creative economy and enabling environment following the CCCM methodology. Each of them is further divided in specific heritage themes, and for each of them indicators proposed (see
Table 1). Public policies may consider the introduction of the proposed indicators while introducing specific measures to stimulate sustainable heritage projects.
On the project level, more specific and detailed indicators may be introduced to ensure sustainability of a specific heritage site. Thus, nine heritage areas are proposed in line with the usual cultural heritage management concept (see
Table 2). These allow performance management measurement at the level of a specific heritage site and may be a useful tool in daily operations.
As cultural/creative industries are also important tools for experience design, they have an important role in experiential tourism which is considered to be sustainable as it focuses on needs and desires of individual tourists, thus avoiding masses and over-tourism. This may be especially important for tourism policies, which before the pandemic hardly coped with over-tourism. The proposed indicators for CCIs’ impact assessment on sustainable experiential tourism on the policy level are divided in two main tourism areas: tourism sustainability, and tourism experiences. These are further developed in specific tourism themes with associated indicators (see
Table 3.)
Finally, indicators for CCIs’ impact assessment on sustainable experiential tourism on the project level are proposed (
Table 4). They are divided in eight main tourism areas, touching main issues in tourism project management. As with the previous sets, this is also further elaborated in specific themes and indicators.
Complexity of issues to be regarded in the heritage/tourism management posed to be a challenge in the design of these indicator sets. First, there are a lot of sustainability issues to be taken into account which results in a number of indicators. Second, there are overlapping issues which can be treated from different perspectives (e.g., local community management can be seen from the point of view of social sustainability or economic sustainability). This may be considered as a limitation to this conceptual framework. The fact is that the integrated indicator sets are rarely available and they have to be adapted to a specific situation.
The proposed conceptual framework and indicator sets are to be further tested. Then, the ex post analyses should be made as to measure their relevance, effectiveness and efficiency. Their contribution is primarily seen in the facilitation of the monitoring process, and consequently in matching the performance of the measures/activities against the policy instrument priorities or project goals. Based on this, policy instruments as well as individual heritage/tourism projects may be enhanced.
