Transnational and cross-border cooperation for sustainable tourism development in the Baltic sea region

ENThis article highlights policy in the field of sustainable tourism development being implemented at various institutional levels with particular attention to Russia as one of the participants in this cooperation. The author of this paper examines the processes aimed at achieving sustainable development goals in tourism at each of these levels. The initial focus of this article is to investigate how the territorial cooperation programs operating in the Baltic Sea Region in 2014-2020 contributed to sustainable development of tourism. There were more than 1000 projects investigated within the research area and the author found that 155 of them contribute to sustainable tourism development. The programs with the highest number of projects are in Latvia-Russia, Poland-Russia and Lithuania-Russia. They are mostly targeted at ecotourism development (35) or historical and cognitive projects (28). This supports our hypothesis regarding the importance of cross-border cooperation programs in implementing United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Keywords: sustainability; sustainable tourism; ecotourism; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); policy; national projects in Russia; biodiversity; the Baltic Sea Region; cross-border cooperation programmes; territorial cooperation.