Taja Maček

Toward viability: applying the Viable System Model to the cruise shorescape

Cruise tourism stands at a crossroads between two distinct future scenarios. The first scenario mirrors the situation in Venice: a ban on cruise ships, dissatisfied residents, degraded areas, and a loss of authenticity due to visitor pressure (Milano, 2018; Vianello, 2016). The second scenario leads to destination managment that still has enough time to intorduce the regenerative governance (Bellato et al., 2022; Cave and Dredge, 2020). The difference between these two scenarios lies in whether the management of the system matches the complexity of the system it is attempting to manage (Yeoman, 2012). This paper advocates the view that tourism in Mediterranean cruise destinations is a failure of regulation rather than a problem of capacity. As per Ashby (1956), this is a matter of a variety mismatch. Regulatory variety is at odds with fragmented destination management and fails to keep pace with the variety generated by cruise tourism. This shortfall manifests as bottlenecks, negative reactions from residents, and reactive bans. Each port is caught between the impulses to promote and to restrict, reacts too slowly, and struggles to coordinate activities (Satta et al., 2015; Pechlaner et al., 2014). The bottleneck lies in the organisational structure, not in port infrastructure or destination capacity (Papathanassis, 2025; Barile & Saviano, 2015). RQ1: Which functions of the VSM are absent or pathological in the cruise shorescape? RQ2: What variety engineering would render the cruise shorescape viable?