The plan that is no longer enough

Why adaptive governance is becoming the new competitive advantage for Ibero-American tourism over the next decade.

The question is not whether Ibero-American tourism will grow. It will. The real question is who is building the governance capacity capable of capturing that growth without forcing territories to absorb its costs themselves. That question — not the size of the budget — will determine the difference between the destinations that lead the next decade and those that arrive too late.

It is useful to begin with an image. Much of Ibero-America’s tourism institutions still navigate with a compass pointing toward a north that has already shifted. Ten-year plans drafted in six months, committees convened only after the crisis has passed, indicators arriving at the pace of an annual report in a world that now moves in quarterly cycles. The instruments are still there; the north has moved.

The sector’s macroeconomic figures remain solid. International tourism contributed approximately 9.1% of global GDP in 2023 and sustained nearly 295 million direct and indirect jobs (UNWTO, 2024). In Colombia, tourism accounts for 2.2% of national GDP (DANE, 2023). The problem does not lie within those aggregate figures. It lies beneath them, in the institutional architecture that either enables or prevents their translation into balanced territorial development. And there, the region faces a deficit that cannot be solved simply with more funding.

The plan that is no longer enough

Valle del Cauca illustrates this reality with the uncomfortable precision only territorial data can provide. The department contains 42 municipalities distributed across five subregions: Pacific, North, Central, South, and Metropolitan Area. Of those 42 municipalities, only 12 have formally established tourism offices, and merely five — Cali, Buga, Buenaventura, Cartago, and Tuluá — maintain personnel dedicated exclusively to the tourism sector (MinCIT, 2022). The remaining thirty municipalities manage tourism alongside multiple other responsibilities, without specific budgets or technical teams. Departmental spending in tourism remains below 0.5% of total public allocation. The asymmetry is structural: 62% of visitors concentrate in Cali, while the Pacific region captures only 8% of departmental tourism expenditure (Government of Valle del Cauca, 2020; MinCIT, 2022).

This is not only Valle del Cauca’s problem. It is the repeated portrait of much of Ibero-America: abundant territorial resources, uneven institutional capacity, and unfinished coordination. Beneath it all lies a silent dependence on electoral cycles. Every municipal or departmental change in government erases institutional memory and restarts the agenda as though nothing had previously occurred.

There are exceptions worth naming. Costa Rica protects nearly 25% of its territory under different conservation categories and has spent more than four decades operating a tourism policy capable of surviving presidential transitions. The Costa Rican Tourism Institute and the National System of Conservation Areas coordinate regulation and voluntary participation through the Certificate for Sustainable Tourism (Honey, 2018). Catalonia developed its Strategic Plan 2020 through deliberative processes involving more than 8,000 stakeholders and a Tourism and City Council responsible for advisory, monitoring, and policy proposal functions (Dredge & Gyimóthy, 2015). In Colombia, Antioquia established its Departmental Tourism System through a 2016 ordinance, granting it real executive capacity, a mixed promotional fund, and a consolidated territorial brand.

These are not perfect models. Yet they share one defining characteristic: they understood that tourism is not merely a sector; it is a system. And systems are not planned — they are learned.

Henry Mintzberg (1994) articulated this with uncomfortable clarity three decades ago: linear planning models assume that the future is a predictable continuation of past trends. Territories, however, operate as complex socioecological systems, where interdependent actors and constant disruptions repeatedly undermine rigid command structures.

Governing what has not yet happened

Adaptive governance is not a slogan. It is a change in premise. Where institutions once planned for certainty, they must now decide under uncertainty. Where the plan once dominated, the system must now learn. Where authority once belonged to a single actor, it must now be distributed among many, under rules that prevent distribution from becoming paralysis.

During a recent meeting with municipal tourism secretaries in southwestern Colombia, one official summarized the issue better than any manual could: “What we lack here is not a plan. What we lack is knowing what to do when the plan no longer works.” Spoken between cups of cooling coffee, that sentence captured the entire challenge facing the field.

What adaptive governance demands is concrete. First, co-decision capacity: public institutions, private stakeholders, and local communities must sit at the same table under the same rules and with access to the same data. Second, real-time learning: decisions must receive quarterly rather than five-year feedback. Third, strategic anticipation: systems must identify weak signals before they evolve into crises.

These principles are easy to state and extraordinarily difficult to articulate in territories where intergovernmental coordination often remains little more than goodwill without protocol.

The challenge, however, is not the absence of theory. Strategic foresight has existed as a formal field for more than three decades, from Godet’s (1993) work on anticipation as a tool for action to contemporary distributed-monitoring approaches. What remains absent is institutional translation: how to transform a prospective scenario into a binding protocol, how to move from “this could happen” to “if this happens, we do this.” That translation is the field’s real frontier.

This gap motivated the development of the Prospective Model of Adaptive Tourism Governance (MOPGTA), validated by twenty-two national and international experts and oriented toward the 2034 horizon. Its central intuition is simple: territorial governance should not be measured by how efficiently it executes planned actions, but by how quickly it reconfigures its rules when context changes. That speed cannot be improvised. It must be built.

And building it requires accepting something many policymakers still resist: the strategic plan can no longer function as a sacred document. It is a working hypothesis — a strong one, perhaps, but still a hypothesis.

Data that does not arrive too late

A digital foresight observatory is not simply another dashboard. Nor is it an abstract data platform. It is an instrument with a specific purpose: closing the temporal gap between what happens in the territory and what institutions decide to do about it.

When that gap lasts months, data merely serves to write reports. When it narrows to weeks, it becomes useful for correction. When it shrinks to days, it enables anticipation.

Technology without governance becomes noise. The region has already seen dashboards full of graphs no one consults, contracts with international consulting firms delivering models impossible to maintain, and tourism applications that survive only as long as the administrations financing them. Governance without technology, meanwhile, becomes slowness: dialogue tables reaching agreements after the problem has already changed shape. Both fail for the same reason — they are disconnected.

That connection is the real technical task facing Ibero-America over the coming years. The objective is not to purchase more software or generate more data. It is to design the rules connecting the sensor to the decision: who receives the signal, within what timeframe, under which activation thresholds, and with what binding response obligations.

That is what transforms an observatory into an instrument of governance rather than a decorative artifact. The difference is not determined by the quality of the data itself, but by the quality of the rules governing its use.

Let us return to the image from the beginning. The compass is not broken; the north has moved. Building this connection does not mean replacing the instrument. It means rethinking the direction itself. The most sophisticated dashboards are of little use if the institutional question remains trapped in the logic of the previous decade.

What speeches rarely say

Ibero-America produces strong tourism diagnoses and even stronger speeches. What remains scarce are institutional architectures capable of transforming diagnoses into decisions and rhetoric into verifiable commitments.

The territories that succeeded in building such capacity — Costa Rica through four decades of policy continuity, Catalonia through the deliberation of eight thousand actors, Antioquia through its ordinance-based departmental system — did not arrive there by accident. They relied on sustained public policy, accumulated technical expertise, real observatories, and the political will both to measure and to be measured.

The question is whether we are willing to have that conversation among ourselves — governors, ministers, promotion agencies, universities, and communities — or whether we will continue importing delayed formulas from elsewhere. Latin America already possesses sufficient technical capacity to design its own frameworks. What is still missing is the political decision to do so and the institutional patience to sustain it beyond a single electoral term.

Tourism in the next decade will not be won through more attractive campaigns or larger budgets. It will be won by destinations capable of learning.

And learning, in institutional terms, means accepting something both simple and profoundly difficult at the same time: yesterday’s plan no longer works, and tomorrow’s system must begin to be built before it arrives.

Author: Julián Andrés Cruz Jaramillo

PhD in Business Administration (Universidad de San Buenaventura Cali, 2026), 

Associate Researcher recognized by Minciencias, and professor in the Master’s Program in Administration at Universidad del Valle, 

Tuluá Campus. Author of the Prospective Model of Adaptive Tourism Governance (MOPGTA).