Many destinations are implementing various water management alternatives to diminish the environmental impacts of tourism and increase sustainability. These efforts toward sustainability can be understood as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies implemented by tourism destinations. This paper is focused on the tourism destination of the Costa Brava (Catalonia, Spain) and proposes a method for selecting a list of influential factors in water management for sustainable tourism destinations by considering stakeholder preferences for technical, economic, social, political, and environmental factors. A new qualitative Delphi technique is used to identify a set of qualitative and quantitative factors by surveying eight stakeholders (six water management experts and two hotel managers). In addition, the study presents the weight for each of the influential factors that decision-makers – water planners, policy-makers, tourism destination managers and hotel managers – can use in assessing water management alternatives. Although research to date has addressed many aspects of responsible tourism, there is little literature on the importance of water management in responsible strategies for tourism destinations. This paper contributes to a more efficient selection of CSR strategies in tourism destinations by proposing a new methodology for identifying key factors for assessing sustainable solutions for water problems.

This paper presents a fuzzy set-based approach for representing and synthesizing information about the different kinds of variables involved in the evaluation of a project’s value. The variables considered can be quantitative crisp or fuzzy as well as qualitative ordinal. The information is given either by a single expert or by a team of experts. The proposed methodology for summarizing and normalizing values aims at contributing to decision-making analysis in the context of multiple-criteria evaluation and group decision making. The conditions that the aggregation function to be used must satisfy are also discussed. The weighted sum is characterized under quite restrictive assumptions, presenting a theorem based on Cauchy’s functional equation. The aggregation function proposed is the weighted sum, with weights computed by a well-known analytic hierarchy process. A design is given of a fuzzy system for evaluating a project’s value in the context of construction in civil engineering.