Program Overview

Economics for Environment, Culture, and Tourism

The master's degree course aims to respond to the need for sustainability in its environmental, social, and economic dimensions, promoting participatory and bottom-up processes, starting from the vocations, resources, and relationships present or activatable in the territory, and with the active involvement of the interested communities.

Objectives

The theoretical frameworks and policy models for development clearly and unanimously indicate the need to guarantee sustainability in its environmental, social, and economic dimensions, promoting participatory and bottom-up processes, starting from the vocations, resources, and relationships present or activatable in the territory, and with the active involvement of the interested communities. The master's degree course intends to respond to these needs through a training offer that aims to give those who achieve the title a general knowledge of the ongoing processes and specific tools useful for formulating projects of sustainable local development that aim at enhancing the territory through tourism and culture, sectors that are driving the economy of this millennium. Since these are very profitable sectors, but also rather risky for the resources and identities of local systems, the training provides a first year aimed at making students well aware of the framework in which they move: the relevant processes, of an economic, geographic-economic, political-institutional, and business type, also in an evolutionary key, awareness of the controversial aspects and environmental and socio-cultural impacts that the enhancement of tourism entails, within which the territories must position themselves to promote their own development and competitiveness path; and complete this set of knowledge of the ongoing processes at the supra-local scale, with the techniques and methodologies of quantitative analysis of the context, representation, and synthesis of potential, design of sustainable development paths.

Course Structure

The training offer is articulated in a first year dedicated to acquiring knowledge of the processes and general and global challenges, and the models and tools available to the territories. This objective will be achieved through courses in applied economics, geography, and organization and planning of tourism, models of analysis of flows and territorial context; the business dimension, in this training project, is reconstructed in its dynamics always in relation to the theme of local development, in particular in the course that trains in the organizational logic of small and medium-sized enterprises. A technical-operational in-depth study is instead planned for the second year, where there will be a greater presence of disciplines that train in quantitative analysis and synthesis of environmental and territorial characteristics, representation, and visualization of data, which should be the flagship of the skills of our graduates.

• The course covers various aspects, including:
  • Economic processes
  • Geographic-economic processes
  • Political-institutional processes
  • Business processes
  • Quantitative analysis of the context
  • Representation and synthesis of potential
  • Design of sustainable development paths
  • Organizational logic of small and medium-sized enterprises
  • Quantitative analysis and synthesis of environmental and territorial characteristics
  • Representation and visualization of data