The Role of EU-Ecolabel and EMAS as Tool for the Socially Responsible Management in the Context of the Italian Tourism

The social component has become a more and more important variable in business management and has taken on the new mood of considering the concept of sustainability. Quality, environment and ethic have become the pillars of business management and they are strategically used by firms in almost every sector of the economic. Considering the multimodal relationship between tourism and environment and its numerous related directs and indirect environmental impacts, terms such as environment, ethics and social responsibility have become familiar in the tourism management. In the tourism sector, where there are several stakeholders and where the link with the territorial context is very strict, the adoption of socially responsible behaviour can be an opportunity to give a significant boost to the sector and, at the same time, to provide a long-term productivity. In the last years, tourism sector has experienced some series of voluntary instruments able to better communicate externally environmental and social performances. Among this, the interest of this paper has been focused on the certification systems EMAS and EU-Ecolabel. In particular, the focus of the paper is to evaluate their use as Corporate Social Responsibility instruments in the context of Italian tourism.