The growing competitiveness and diversity of tourism products and destinations due to the globalisation dynamics and new forms of production and consumption led to the exploitation of more and more initiatives that seek to take advantage of culture and creativity based experiences of tourism to offer visitors unique and authentic opportunities to immerse themselves in cultural dynamics and places that foster co-creation and learning with the host community members. These experiences had benefitted, particularly from the growth of the cultural and creative sector and synergies with tourism, contributing to new products, experiences and markets. In search of evidence to decision-making processes and hence to improve the accountability, innovation and learning of a particular project, program or policy (Gertler et al. 2016), there was an increasing demand for new assessment methods that can provide insights about the value and impact of cultural and creative activities in sustainable tourism practices. But despite the growing enthusiasm for the potential of these activities, there are not many studies that attempt to measure their multiple impacts, and even less include several dimensions of sustainability in their analysis (e.g. Korez-Vide 2013; Wisansing & Vongvisitsin 2019). To contribute to a better understanding of the creative processes and cultural dynamics, taking into account local communities and each territory’s specificities, our team develop a comprehensive and operational assessment framework to evaluate the impacts in the multi-dimensions of the development of sustainable tourism initiatives. In this sense, tourism driven by sustainable development goals is related with the promotion of the wellbeing of the communities, which implies not only the improvement of social, economic and environmental conditions, but also the vitality and quality of life of those communities and places, both through the cultural involvement of its members and the conservation and preservation of various tangible and intangible forms of culture. This framework has led to the construction of a self-assessment tool (already tested in our research projects) for the continuous monitoring of these activities by its promoters that aims to inform and guide actions, policies and relations with local stakeholders. References Gertler, et al. 2016 Impact Evaluation in Practice. The World Bank Korez-Vide (2013) Promoting sustainability of tourism by creative tourism development: How far is Slovenia. Innovative Issues and Approaches in Social Sciences, 6(1), 77–102 Wisansing & Vongvisitsin (2019) Local impacts of creative tourism initiatives. In Duxbury & Richards, A Research Agenda for Creative Tourism, 122–136). Edward Elgar

--