The relational economic geography and its use in tourism clusters studies

Abstract

This paper presents the evolution of the theory of Relational Economic Geography (REG) as a theoretical basis to regional analysis and to tourism destinations analysis. It presents the origin, foundations, conceptualization trends and criticism of this perspective. It also describes a contextualisation through a comparison between the analyzes of tourist destinations based on productive clusters (networks, districts, clusters and local productive arrangements) and analysis from the GER perspective. It is a qualitative study, of theoretical and conceptual revision, whose objective is to verify if the GER is a complementary perspective to the classic studies of productive agglomerations or if it is a perspective that can substitute them, supplying some deficiencies that have been pointed out by the researchers. It concluded that the REG can be used to tourism destination studies, regardless of the territorial organization or productive that it has. As well as, REG perspective can generate tools to translate the relational thinking, taking it out of abstraction and bringing this theoretical concept to the practice of territorial management of tourism destination.