Managing and monitoring sustainable regional development in alpine regions

Alpine landscape always has been affected by human economic activities. Traffic economy, tourism economy and industrial structure dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises have been the drivers of economy development as well as of changes in the alpine landscape throughout the last century. There have been tremendous influences of economic activities on special areas but also on the alpine landscape in general. For years, numerous regions have been subjected to a strong structural change. Globalisation leads to an acceleration of this structural change. Also, globalisation leads to a fast transition of companies, branches and economies. The regions try to influence the negative effects of this structural change in various ways. The results of their efforts are very different. Some regions manage to improve their economic situation whereas others get worse. It is an open question, which structural and procedural factors are responsible for these differences. So, the question arises how regions are going to organise and manage their sustainable development in the long run. Therefore, appropriate management tools have to be designed. If we knew, what kind strategies regions should apply and how they should change their strategies in the light of the growing influence of globalisation, we could be able to develop tools for future regional development, that could take the demands of sustainability better into account. To get a framework for this purpose, the paper is divided into three main parts: firstly, considerations are made on the concept of sustainable development and its meaning for touristic regions in the alpine space. Secondly, we will have a closer look on the state of the art regarding indicator systems for sustainable regional and tourism development. In the third sections we conclude the prerequisites we find for the development of a toolbox for regions, to monitor and manage their own regional and tourism development tracking towards sustainability.