## 4 E-Consultation on the Spatial Development of the Tourist Sector in Greece
### E-Consultation Results  
During the last two years, tourist development of the Greek territory has been extensively discussed, mainly as a promising perspective for attracting investments and reinforcing economic activity in this stagnating, for the country, period. In this respect, three successive e-consultations took place on this specific issue through the \"OpenGov\" platform. The last one, being the subject of this paper, aims at certain policy reform in the sector at the national level and was opened in the period June 7 to July 22 2013, for gathering the opinions of the public on this reform (citizens, stakeholders, decision-makers, _etc._). In support of this e-consultation, certain materials were uploaded in the \"OpenGov\" platform, relating to the: proposed legislation (article by article description), proposed spatial development plan of the sector (Figure 4), Strategic Environmental Assessment of the proposed plan, _etc._ In the following, the focus is on the _critical discussion of this participatory exercise_, concentrating on both the participatory process and the results, _i.e._, the impact of public participation on the final policy decision. Towards this end, _data_ used relates to the [43]: (a) preparatory material uploaded in the \"OpenGov\" platform; (b) comments gathered during the consultation period; and (c) final policy decision (final legislation text) out of this process. The _outcome_ of the e-consultation process has as follows:  
* _Number of comments_: 59 comments. * _Type of participants_: 19 citizens (classified into citizens specifying their identity e.g., politicians, engineers and citizens non-specifying their identity) and 15 organizations (firms, associations and municipalities). As to the number of comments, citizens with non-specified position were rating first, followed by firms and engineers (see Figure 5a). * _Comments by article_: the share of comments by article sheds light on the emphasis placed by participants on the spatial dimension of the proposed policy reform (Figure 5b). More specifically, the majority of comments (63 percent) were concentrated on the directions of spatial organization of the tourist sector (article 5 and 6), and the classification (As defined in Table 1 below) of tourist regions (14 percent) (article 4). These were considered as key elements of the proposed policy reform, as they are somehow affecting the \"where\" and \"what\" policy decisions, _i.e._, what type of tourist development path in which type of region. * _Submission date_: by classifying comments received by submission date, it is stressed the uneven distribution in time of comments uploaded, while of interest is the fact that about half of them (46 percent) were uploaded during the last day and the majority of them (88 percent) during the last 16 days of the e-consultation (Figure 5c). * _Timely response_: all comments were timely uploaded in the platform (within 1 to 3 h from the time they were uploaded by participants), thus providing the chance to participants to get informed on comments already uploaded by other participants.