The present paper provides empirical evidence of the opportunities and challenges surrounding green finance (GF), looking at the financial issues that might prevent the investment decisions of green companies. To this end, we explore the case of Italian biomass producers by means of a discourse analysis supported by a survey administered to a pool of experts. Although our findings suggest that GF provides an opportunity for achieving environmentally sustainable innovation pathways, experts recognize that it does not actually prevent biomass producers from facing institutional and financial criticalities in funding their investment projects. Such criticalities include: uncertainty about government policies, the minimal involvement of financial suppliers in the biomass sector, the short-term orientation of financial instruments and the limited knowledge of financing options and technical expertise within companies. The results indicate that effective policy interventions should ensure that objectives are orientated towards the long term with the aim of reducing the risks perceived by financial institutions in funding biomass producers.

Responsible tourism provides a particular lens by which to consider how to improve the sustainability of tourism with the ambition to enhance the positive impacts of mainstream tourism, while reducing the negative ones. In this view, facilitating travel for people with disabilities represents an exceptional opportunity, and the idea that what is accessible to one traveler may be very difficult to access to another one with a different type of disability, makes inclusive tourism a relevant part of the global sustainable tourism agenda. The present study aims to provide empirical evidence on the adoption of the principles of responsible and inclusive tourism within a national park area. To this end, the paper discusses the case of the “E-Parks” research project which investigated the area of the Gargano National Park (Italy) with a special focus on the problems faced by tourists with disabilities, and on the improvements to enable all tourists to have the full enjoyment of their tourism experience. The study contributes, therefore, to enriching the empirical literature on inclusive and responsible tourism that has its application in the design of trademark procedural guidelines enabling tourists with different disabilities to access a protected natural area.

Although regulations designed to meet the necessities of tourists with disabilities are allowing disables to travel more, they are still encountering barriers and discriminatory practices. A relevant obstacle in making the tourist policy effective is represented by the lack of information and communication about needs and expectations of disabled categories. In this context, the present paper focuses on the coproduction process of tourist public policies for disables by looking at the network that facilitates communication among the actors taking part in the process. We adopt the Social Network Analysis (SNA) to study the policy network, i.e., how public administrations and policy users (associations of citizens/people with disabilities and entrepreneurs) exchange information about the accessibility to the Gargano National Park, a protected natural area in the South of Italy. In particular, we investigate the role of entrepreneurial stakeholders in channeling information and the presence of policy brokers, i.e., stakeholders that spread the policies to the whole network. Our findings show that a limited number of actors involved in granting accessibility to tourists with disabilities is engaged in information exchanges. Moreover, information flows are guided by only one public administration that plays, therefore, a key role in the implementation of policies that support the parks’ accessibility.

The contribution of universities to the sustainability challenge is nowadays crucial due to their role as centers of learning, innovation and research. However, universities can deal with sustainability matters in many different ways which should be accurately identified in their strategies. In this context, the present paper has tested the suitability of backcasting as a participatory approach to involve stakeholders in discussing the most effective actions to improve sustainability within universities’ strategic plan. The experiment—carried out at University of Foggia (UniFg-Italy)—has demonstrated the flexibility of the backcasting approach in identifying the actions required to reach the UniFg sustainability goals according to the 2030 Agenda, allowing the university governance bodies to reach a number of objectives in the design stage. Furthermore, backcasting enhanced the confidence of stakeholders involved with an overall improvement of their empowerment, enabling them to follow and keep track of the whole process of the university’s strategy definition.