Evaluating EU regional tourism funding through a fuzzy-set analysis

The effectiveness of EU regional development funds in tourism is widely debated, but project-level evaluations often face a methodological difficulty: publicly available evidence does not necessarily reveal actual project outcomes. This study examines the publicly observable alignment between funded project representations and the strategic objectives of Portugal’s regional Alentejo, 2020 programme. Drawing on administrative project records, official project descriptions, and project or company websites, the study applies fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to 104 explicitly identifiable tourism-related projects. The analysis reveals an uneven pattern of public alignment: economic, territorial, and market-oriented objectives are more consistently visible in project descriptions than environmental and innovation-related objectives. The findings should therefore be interpreted as evidence of how funded projects are publicly represented in relation to programme priorities, rather than as evidence of actual environmental, organizational, or economic performance.