e-Participation Model for Sustainable Cultural Tourism Management: a Bottom-Up Approach Aline Chiabai 1, * , Krassimira Paskaleva 2,3 and Patrizia Lombardi 4 1 Basque Centre for Climate Change BC3, Bilbao, Spain 2 Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, Forschungzentrum Karlsruhe Gmbh, Germany 3 Herbert Simon Institute, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, United Kingdom 4 Dipartimento Casa-Città, Politecnico di Torino, Italy ABSTRACT The paper presents a ‘bottom-up approach’ for cultural tourism management, based on the development of an e-participation website for an Italian city, where the stakeholders are placed at the centre of the decisional process. The analysis provides an indication on how to personalize and differentiate the cultural tourism offer according to the stakeholders’ perspectives and to specific territorial characteristics. Innovative techniques of stakeholders’ engagement are offered by information and communication technologies tools that can play a vital role in today’ s cultural destinations. However, the study shows that the Web is yet to be utilized as an effective tool in stakeholders’ participation processes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 23 February 2010; Revised 15 June 2011; Accepted 23 June 2011 Keywords: action–research cycle; bottom-up approach; cultural heritage; e-participation; e-services; ICT — information and communication technologies. INTRODUCTION S ustainable cultural tourism is often seen as a key generator of the resources necessary to preserve and enhance cultural heritage (EC, 2000; DigiCULT, 2002). During the past decades, the concept of cultural heritage and its management has expanded while becoming more complex in a globalized world. The rapid eco- nomic changes and the consequent urban develop- ment have indeed contributed in diversifying the tourist offer. The tourism industry can be described nowadays as a network of partnerships that create the tourism product (Bramwell and Lane, 2000). These alliances, taking many different forms and operating with different objectives (Reid et al., 2008), should be taken into account for a sustain- able management of cultural heritage. In this context, existing top-down approaches (where policies are defined by the government or central administrations) have failed to accomplish their purpose as they do not consider many stake- holders’ views and the vast diversity of local assets that go far beyond the ‘objectively recog- nized heritage’. On the contrary, bottom-up approaches, based on stakeholder participation, can be successful as they allow jumping from administrative-oriented organizations towards user-oriented organizations (Torres et al., 2006). One of today’s main challenges for tourist destinations is to engage all relevant stakeholders into the participation processes and develop efficient and effective models providing solutions that can reflect stakeholders’ needs and expecta- tions in a democratic way. Before analysing how this can be achieved, it is important to define the stakeholders in the context of cultural heritage. As generally described by Freeman (1984: 46), stakeholders are ‘any group that can affect or is affected by the achievement of an organization’s objectives’. This definition can be adapted to the cultural *Correspondence to: A. Chiabai, Basque Centre for Climate Change BC3, Alemada Urquijo 4, 4  -1  | 48008 Bilbao, Spain. E-mail: aline.chiabai@bc3research.org INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH Int. J. Tourism Res. (2011) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.871 Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.