Local Entrepreneurship Through a Multistakeholders’ Tourism Living Lab in the Post-Violence/Peripheral Era in the Basque Country

This paper examines a transformative tourism case study driven by local entrepreneurship in the coastal and post-violence/peripheral village of Zumaia, in the Basque Country (Spain). This paper aims at addressing an innovative methodology called ‘Tourism Living Lab through Multistakeholders’ Penta Helix framework’ in response to a globalised trend of increasing visitors. The result shows democratic tourism policy-making practices at the local level, including (i) a participatory strategic formulation process (ii) by fostering a local entrepreneurial ecosystem to overcome ‘tourism-phobia’ (iii) while renewing local identity (iv) through bridging social capital for a new post-violence era in the Basque Country.


Introduction: Post-violence/peripheral era in the Basque Country
Peripheral places are often exposed to the influence of changes from market dimensions to data technologies. From rural peripheral villages to urbanised metropolitan nodes, many territories acquire new economic, social, and cultural functions while becoming tourism destinations.
Thus, they generate new opportunities for their development, becoming unique core cityregions by leaving their peripheral status behind, yet facing new risks derived from the dynamics of global changes, as in the case of the trend to increase tourism (Wilson & Antón, 2016).
Despite a geopolitical world context characterised by increasing boundaries to human mobility in an uneven realm full of walls and borders, current tourism patterns have not diminished.
Indeed, translocal mobility reflecting a wide range of motivations, emotions, tools, destinations, and strategies provides new opportunities to analyse, experiment, and propose new smart policies that facilitate the transition to unexplored, sustainable and increasingly democratic tourism models (Wonderful Copenhagen, 2016; World Tourism Organisation [UNWTO], 2017) by overcoming the shortcomings and negative side effects of 'tourismification' (Salazar, 2009), also known as 'tourism-phobia' (Colomb & Novy, 2017).
In the absence of innovative policy frameworks to strike a balance amidst such negative impacts, 'tourismification' is largely responsible for forcing irreversible changes upon residents in local areas, resulting in an inevitable devolution into 'tourism-phobia'.
Regarding required innovative policy tourism responses, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has stated as follows: 'Rapid growth in international tourism flows, new consumer trends, digitalisation of the economy, security issues, and adaptation to climate change are among the major challenges facing the tourism sector. These will require active, innovative, and integrated policy responses to ensure that tourism remains a competitive sector and continues to deliver economically and sustainably in the years to come'. (2016, p. 17) However, very little is known about how unexplored tourism models and innovative integrated policy responses require local entrepreneurship initiatives and interventions, even in relation to peripheral and rural areas. Hence, this paper aims at presenting an evidence-based experimental and socially innovative intervention methodology based on Living Labs (Kronsell & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2018) that was applied to tourism practices and policies with the broad participation of a multistakeholder framework (Figure 3) in the small coastal, peripheral, and rural village of Zumaia, located in the Basque Country city-region of northern Spain ( Figure 1).
In Zumaia, as in many small coastal, peripheral, and rural villages in Europe (European Commission, 2016), fostering local entrepreneurship requires socially innovative approaches (Jürgen, Kaletka, Schöder, & Marthe, 2018) with complex tools to enhance strategic and prospective capabilities and scale them up among citizens (residents/locals or visitors/tourists), rather than merely applying technological recipes for 'smart tourism' (Buhalis & Costa, 2006). Instead, 'smart tourism' should be re-conceptualised as characterised by a democratic imperative towards a more sustainable political economy for territorial and urban development, which requires collective leadership that is constructively engaged with the local community by ensuring a highly representative participation and deliberation process and a regularly monitored action plan (Barcelona City Council, 2017;Harvey, 1989). Thus, this paper depicts an experimental methodological process carried out from January to December 2017 through Living Labs (Baccarne, Schuurman, & Merchant, 2014;Cardullo, Kitchin, & Di Feliciantonio, 2017;Steen & van Bueren, 2017;URB@Exp, 2017) to establish the 2018-2021 touristic roadmap with the participation of strategic stakeholders in the village of Zumaia as a means of both (i) overcoming the narrow vision created by the 'tourismification' phenomenon among locals and (ii) establishing a participatory mechanism beyond the classical tools of strategic positioning.
In general, tourism destination planning and marketing are fundamental placemaking actions intended to shape the temporality of image and imageability of a place by locals and visitors (Lew, 2017) by avoiding 'tourismification' (Salazar, 2009). Thus, locally rooted organic placemaking and emergent participatory planning processes are required to enhance community participation in the decisions that shape people's surroundings. Local entrepreneurship initiatives can underpin culturally rooted, transformative, and adaptive translocal responses to create data-driven tourism living labs at the municipal level.
The experimental interventions that empower local communities regarding the role of tourists as visitors and locals as residents in remote, peripheral, and coastal regions are particularly remarkable in the context of this paper in relation to the key case of Zumaia in the Basque Country (Spain), which established a participatory local strategy for tourism after two remarkable events that had tourism-related consequences: (i) successfully attracting and gaining 50% of the visitors to the Basque Coast Geopark, a highly valued geological area of the UNESCO Global Geoparks' Network (European Commission, 2016;OECD, 2016;UNESCO Global Geoparks, 2016), and (ii) the filming of scenes for the blockbuster TV series  inhabitants, Zumaia is configured as a peripheral and rural area with a high population density, a GDP per capita of 35,742 € and an unemployment rate of 10.55%. More than 70% of the residents speak the Basque language (Heller, Pujolar, & Duchêne, 2014) and show a strong sense of identity in relation to the territory, the natural environment, and traditions. Zumaia, as part of the Basque Coast Geopark, is a natural protected area with a highly valued geological heritage: 13 km of cliffs with a spectacular formation of rock layers known as flysch deposits.
It has excellent transport links and is close to the three Basque capitals, as San Sebastian and Bilbao are only 30 and 50 minutes away by car, respectively.
The type of seasonal tourism predominant in the peripheral region is beginning to change the habits of and congest mature destinations such as San Sebastian. The high attractive value of Zumaia makes it one of the local destinations absorbing some of these visitors. Just as British visitors to rural France spend time and effort attempting to become 'local' (Brotherton, 2015), Zumaia's visitors respect the environment and community. Indeed, the challenge is how to 'localise' these generic, ideal-type visitors through their temporary and partial experience by achieving for them a richer, mutually 'profitable' visit and local scenery enrichment. In addition, during the year, there was an ideal-type of targeted visitors and tourism connected to both knowledge of and research about the flysch. We can argue that the first type, the generic, is a more leisure-oriented tourist ideal-type (experiential tourist), whereas the second type, the specific, is a more knowledge-driven tourist ideal-type (cognitive tourist). At a glance, the evolution of the number of visitors to Zumaia from 2015 to 2016 has increased 18% (from 41,224 to 48,691), and the profile/ideal-type of visitor that has gained momentum is the international tourist. In 2015, the number of international tourists was 6,772, and in 2016, the number was 10,157, a 49% increase (Table 1, evolution in red). This trend shows that Zumaia could be portrayed as a post-peripheral site with a flow of international visitors/tourists that could 'alter' the local social, economic, and lifestyle dynamics of the village. Indeed, that was the main concern of the Town Council and primary reason to initiate the participatory and experimental process and case called '#ZumaiaLab' that this paper addresses. In addition to this partial policy concern, the broader regional context of the Basque Country in Spain inevitably must be described as a post-violence society, a fact that could have a direct influence on the increasing number of visitors, particularly from Spain. This case should thus be contextualised within a momentum: after gradually overcoming the dramatic consequences of the political violence (Voltes-Dorta, Jiménez, & Suárez-Alemán, 2016), to understand the socio-political challenge at the micro/community level and to suggest an experimental implementation (Evans, Karvonen, & Raven, 2016) considering the mutual stakeholders' interdependencies, a dynamic strategic intervention was implemented in Zumaia. Hence, discussing the links between local entrepreneurship and tourism in this case study cannot be addressed without underlining that Zumaia, and more generally the Basque Country (Boronska-Hryniewiecka, 2016), is making a transition towards a post-peripheral and postviolence era. This in turn has substantial institutional and social implications worth considering while reflecting upon existing policies and emerging practices to foster local development in such areas.
The paper presents the post-violence/peripheral era in a city-region and village via an in-depth re-examination and thus, a transition. The next section will address the rationale by introducing the working hypothesis describing a potential way to overcome 'tourism-phobia' as a negative and popular expression of 'tourismification' through multistakeholders' 'Penta Helix' approach to fostering local entrepreneurship (Calzada & Cowie, 2017). Thereafter, the research design will be presented by examining how the Tourism Living Lab at Zumaia's municipality level was shaped. In the fourth section, the intervention results as the achieved strategic formulation will be shown. Finally, the paper will present its four conclusions.
According to Salazar (2017), an alternative anthropology for the local level should be established to understand the changing nature of tourism as human activity. Likewise, from a critical perspective, Colomb and Novy (2017) argued that capitalism is desperately trying to re-make all of tourism in its own image, but has not fully succeeded in doing so. Thus, from the political economy perspective (Harvey, 1989), 'tourism-phobia' can also be seen as dysfunctional because tourism is the least centralised major 'industry' in the larger picture of current global markets. Local small business owners with little backing and only family labour, or perhaps a few employees or local (social) entrepreneurs at best, can still operate a successful boutique hotel, café, or restaurant and make a decent living for themselves and their workers.
Thus, the emergent and so-called 'sharing economy' appears to have taken the side of the corporate take-over of tourism, which is a step backwards, not forward, in wealth redistribution and social innovation. This issue, that of the 'sharing economy' provoking 'tourism-phobia', is a threat, a challenge and an opportunity, as it is a key factor in the development of a tourismled local entrepreneurship in post-peripheral areas such as the one under discussion here.
Amidst this changing global context (Kettle, 2017), as the key focus of this paper, a turning point and urgent policy response was required in Zumaia during 2016 following the exponential and rapid growth of national and international visitors in recent years as a consequence of ( Table 1) (Cilliers & Timmermans, 2014). It hoped to become a sustainable smart destination by directing attention towards experiences that unfold in remote and peripheral places with a strong cultural identity, such as New Zealand, which turned into a case reference to become a film location for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the international experience in the planning and management of sustainable tourism destinations in Iceland (Truter, Chambers, & Alley, 2017).
The reason this case can be presented as innovative is based on the results, which show a contribution towards a new placemaking touristic paradigm based on the following factors: (i) local entrepreneurship organised by groups of stakeholders, (ii) real-time deliberation through data literacy, citizen-centric engagement, and prototyping, and, ultimately, (iii) a democratic bottom-up process bridging the aftermath of a violent era and curing bounds to renew social capital. This paper aims to reveal a transitional paradigm for tourism placemaking through local entrepreneurship by avoiding the techno-determinism embodied by smart cities (Buhalis & Costa, 2006), smart specialisation, and industry 4.0 policy schemes, and by favouring horizontal, accountable, critical, and participatory ecosystems that will channel sustainable development and community control over future touristic outcomes (Scholz, 2016).
Thus, the author examines the status of an amalgamation of local entrepreneurship initiatives in Zumaia fuelled by local public authorities that engaged a wide range of multistakeholders as well as the experimentation with novel placemaking processes by blending data-driven interventions with the Living Lab approach (Table 3). The method designed for the experimental Tourism Living Lab aimed to set up a participatory itinerary through a multistakeholder scheme following the Penta Helix multistakeholders framework by encompassing local authorities, the private sector, academia, research centres, civic society, (social) entrepreneurs, and activists. In particular, the use of the Penta Helix framework itself entails a differential of this intervention with others (Almirall, Lee, & Wareham, 2012). Despite the efforts to map out Living Labs experiences, this case stands out because it explicitly incorporates the fifth helix (social entrepreneurs and activists) as the seed to establish a locally based entrepreneurial ecosystem (Figure 2). Alongside the results of the intervention, remarkable potential has been noticed for the proactivity of these 'fifth-helix' agents. As a strategic consideration, however, it remains unclear whether these agents could establish a critical mass to transform the local dynamics.  Table 2. Upon reviewing the evolution from the Triple Helix to the Quadruple Helix, the Penta Helix framework highlights the need to include a transformative element of the system, such as (social) entrepreneurs, in the interplay with the other helixes (public, private, academia, and civic society).
By following the Penta Helix framework, the research methodology for the Tourism Living Lab, called #ZumaiaLab, was established by identifying a list of the following stakeholders per helix (the number of individuals representing institutions is grouped in Figure 3): • Public sector: 31 • Private sector: 29 • Civic society: 29 • Academia: 7 • (Social) Entrepreneurs: 12 (iv) #ZumaiaLab 2: On 10 November 2017, the second Tourism Lab took place with a reduced intervention group of 51 people. In this Tourism Living session, prototyping was the aim, and five projects were developed (#ZumaiaLab 2, 2017).
Thus, the timeframe between the first and the second Tourism Living Lab was two months, which provided an efficient intervention rhythm from session to session, starting from the strategic formulation of the ten strategic axes (#ZumaiaLab 1) on 12 September 2017 and moving to the operational Living Lab prototyping session for the five projects on 10 November 2017. The following table summarises the research design by detailing how the author has methodologically examined and therefore interpreted the qualitative and quantitative data that were collected (Calzada & Arranz, 2018).

In-depth Interviews
In-depth interviews, as the first qualitative technique employed in the methodological sequence, facilitated the ways in which each multi-stakeholder helix group contextualised the strategic axes. This technique was extremely relevant to the design of the #ZumaiaLab Tourism Living Lab sessions.

108
From 1 June to 1 September

#ZumaiaLab 1
The first Living Lab session, as the second qualitative technique employed, aimed at validating and prioritising ten strategic axes and defining five projects for prototyping for the second #ZumaiaLab Tourism Living Lab session. The quantity of participants but also the degree of representation (having regional and provincial ministers and policymakers, among the participants) were remarkable. This session was the critical step for the strategic formulation and the bridge towards the prototyping phase in the #ZumaiaLab 2 session. We see Living Labs as innovation platforms in which the stakeholders develop and exchange ideas in a community. In the context of the smart city debate in the Basque Country, a slight evolution from smartness to experimentation, as something already given to or produced for us, can be noticed as a preliminary impact of this paper. As such, in this Tourism Living Lab in Zumaia, 'smart citizens' were already being considered decision-makers rather than mere data providers (Calzada, 2018). However, although this new management model made a contribution at the beginning of the transformational process of tourism decision-making, it remains to be seen whether the Penta Helix framework can be established as a local entrepreneurial mechanism to assist in real-time policy-making.
Given the importance of local entrepreneurship, this innovative intervention was interested in how links can be built between cutting-edge practices and policies in tourism at the municipality level and the engagement of a diverse set of participants representing an entirely different socio-economic perspective. Thus, this Tourism Living Lab approach was defined as a site devised to design, test, and learn from social and technical innovation in real time. As such, it included the following features and principles: (i) a technology infrastructure; (ii) an ecosystem of stakeholders who can interact to develop and assess products, services, processes, or systems; (iii) an innovation process that is as open as possible; (iv) users playing a key role as co-creators of the products, services and technologies being developed; (iv) a human-centric design approach involving ethnographic observation, empathy, and rapid prototyping; (v) sustained and meaningful interaction and community involvement; and (vi) consideration of users' natural environments.
To assess the impacts of touristic activities and how these impacts influenced visitor experience and locals' perception, a systemic approach was used, as it provided an understanding of the relationship between tourism and its social ecosystem in Zumaia. This offered the tools needed to clarify the complex realm of the touristic experience and opportunities for local entrepreneurship.

Intervention results: Strategic formulation
Following the previous section's explanation of the research design consisting of four techniques carried out by following an action research triangulation methodology, this section depicts the intervention results and data for the strategic formulation of the Town Council of Zumaia village. Further results and data are available in open access (#ZumaiaLab 1; #ZumaiaLab 2; #ZumaiaLab Survey, 2017) and through the hashtag #ZumaiaLab on Twitter.
(i) Survey: At the time the survey was gathering responses, there was remarkable media pressure concerning the impact of 'tourism-phobia'. According to the results, 61% of respondents considered visitors/tourists as positive net contributors to the local economy, whereas 22% considered them a hindrance. When asking residents/locals if they would be happy to receive further visitors/tourists, 50% answered 'more', whereas 39% said 'less'. The positive perception of tourism was moderate, given the cautious behaviour by locals in town and the minimal coordination and self-organisation between multistakeholders.
(ii) In-depth interviews: The 'big picture' was nuanced and clarified with the 108 interviews conducted. Given that in-depth interviews were the 'bridge' to designing the Tourism Living Lab, this technique provided valuable information at that stage.
In general, the diverse position of individuals aligned with their specific helix or stakeholder group determined their opinion. Additionally, given the highly politicised local environment, which allowed political violence in the past by provoking unrest among certain individuals, the political preferences of each participant in the Tourism Living Lab automatically determined their perception, practices, and policy choices on tourism. implicit overall agreement within the division, creating an opportunity to build a collective intelligence driven by action by bridging even heterogeneous stakeholders in the village. We must call attention here to the hypothesis that in the Basque Country, as a broader regional context of this case study, the Mondragon co-operative group has extensively influenced the private and public sectors towards a grassroots entrepreneurial subculture that we could align with the 'commons' (Calzada, 2013;Zurbano, 2005). As such, alongside this intervention, we should leave one additional open question to improve the debate by stressing the intellectual output of this work: is this entrepreneurial subculture still influencing cases such as Zumaia in a positive way by overcoming the aftermath of the political violence in a past era and bridging local and communitarian social capital among locals/residents?

Conclusions
In conclusion, this paper introduced an intervention that took place in the postviolence/peripheral village of Zumaia located in the Basque Country (Spain), where a Tourism Living Lab was implemented from January to December 2017 to foster local entrepreneurship and overcome the growing mass tourism trend and its negative side effects, which together are known as 'tourism-phobia'. This paper arrives at four conclusions by revisiting the aims of the paper, stressing the intellectual output of the work, and specifying implications for further research in this field as follows: First, the impact on the village is the first priority for locals/residents, even before reflecting on the potential opportunities offered by a tourism boom. Despite the positive effect on economic revenue for local finances, the environmental concerns and the strong seasonality of tourists emphasise the requirement for a deliberative touristic governance model, one based on forward-looking strategies reinforced by bottom-up and participatory practices, policy, and strategic formulation, and ultimately fixed by the taxpayers. This suggests that there is room to explore community-driven business models of local tourism as a way to formalise an alternative policy-making procurement pathway based on co-operative platforms (Scholz, 2016).
Second, as the result of the intervention suggests, a multistakeholders' framework based on the Penta Helix could be a promising methodology to foster local entrepreneurship by breaking the silos between the 'helixes' or the governance domains. In the case of Zumaia, strong social capital has been reinforced by overcoming the aftermath of the political confrontation and violent dynamics alongside the experimental approach to designing tourism practices and policies. In addition, the peripheral nature of the place has been replaced by a new, hopeful momentum led and empowered entirely by its citizens and stakeholders.
Third, the 'sharing economy' alters not only the dynamics of large metropolises but also peripheral and remote villages such as Zumaia, especially in tourism. In data-driven cityregions, extractive data aggregation activities owned by multinational giants, such as Uber and Airbnb, are socially gentrifying and territorially modifying the DNA of places. To overcome the negative side effects of the 'sharing economy' and its 'extractivist' business models in Zumaia, the intervention identified real consequences for coexistence and the lifestyle in villages (Bria & Morozov, 2018). Hence, socially innovative practices are now more relevant than ever to establish a third way of entrepreneurship between the market and the state at the local level. According to the intervention results through the strategic formulation, new economic activity based on the interaction among stakeholders would allow the emergence of a 'tourism commons' in different forms based on data devolution and literacy. 'Tourism commons' could be shaped as co-operatives run by local entrepreneurs to offer and co-create with tourists/visitors as another kind of human interaction and economic exchange. This new form of local entrepreneurialism will be crucial for both the transparency of the policies and the openness of the democratic systems at the municipal level.
Fourth, and revisiting the main aim of this paper, we can conclude by advocating experimental Living Labs at the municipal level as a way of establishing innovative policy-making participatory processes insofar as they could shed light on new manners to formulate strategy for policy practice and policy in tourism. In this attempt to envisage real social transformations (i) where policy, politics, democracy, and data meet in conflicting strategies among stakeholders, (ii) demands and in-depth bottom-up experiments to deconstruct dichotomies, inequalities, and misalignments, and (iii) where local entrepreneurs-as the fifth helix-are