ECTN — From Sustainability Strategy to Destination Resilience: Diagnosing Implementation Conditions in Greek Tourism Destinations

This paper argues that strategy density does not reliably translate into implementation capacity, and that this translation gap is itself a resilience vulnerability for cultural tourism destinations. Adopting an ecological conception of resilience, it argues that a destination becomes more resilient when adaptation measures are executed, not merely adopted, and that execution depends on conditions existing prior to and independently of any particular measure — conditions that are graded rather than binary and that can fail through insufficiency or through accumulation of overlapping requirements. The paper documents that seven destination and cultural-tourism instruments in general use — including the GSTC Destination Criteria, the Green Destinations Standard, the European Tourism Indicator System, the Transition Pathway for Tourism, Council of Europe Cultural Routes certification, the Thessalia Charter, and Greece's destination-management legislation — name coordinating and execution capability as necessary but record it only as met or unmet, taken or not taken, certified or not, and are structurally unable to register any state between presence and absence. Kefalonia, in the Greek Ionian Islands, serves as a destination-level illustration, examined through a documentary method using publicly available legislative, administrative, and statistical sources, with explicit method limitations disclosed. The illustration surfaces six recurring conditions — coordination, translation, navigability, workforce and advisory capacity, information, and continuity — including a finding of coordination structures forming along multiple, non-connecting groupings simultaneously rather than being simply absent. The paper's contribution is conceptual and diagnostic rather than prescriptive: it proposes that implementation-condition assessment become a routine, destination-owned component of resilience planning, prior to and complementary to existing instruments, without proposing a framework, an instrument, or a method, and states its positionality and limitations explicitly throughout.