The Illusion of Proximity in Territorial Construction. An Approach to Tourism Development Via Social Networks in Sierra De Albarracín (Spain)

Tourism development has been a particularly intense area of negotiation in the Spanish countryside since the 1990s because of its major role in public policies for the economic restructuring, the regionalisation of policy instruments and its own intersectoral nature. This leads us to examine how the coordination takes place within the actors engaged in the tourist development of Sierra de Albarracín. This research adopts an inductive approach to the social relations that underlie the construction of a tourism project territory. From the meeting between the methodology of the social network analysis and the analytical framework of the School of Proximity, the procedure presented here helps to understand the logics of territorial construction. Cooperation appears more fictitious than the policy instruments of governance envisage. Questioning both cooperative and conflictive proximities offers new clues for the evaluation of public policy instruments.