Smart Territories, Collaborative Entrepreneurship, and Eco-Friendly Tourism for Development: El Boalo-Cerceda-Mataelpino (Madrid, Spain) Case

Introduction

Climate change is one of the most significant challenges that humanity is facing recently. One of the pillars to at least alleviate climate change is given by the correct and efficient recycling of urban waste, both solid and organic, as warming ocean temperatures are increasing the frequency of coral reef bleaching. The effects of anthropogenic – human-caused – climate change range from more frequent and severe droughts and drier weather that negatively affects forests, as they are no longer recovering from wildfires, to snowstorms and extreme winter weather in temperate regions as a result of warming Arctic weather fronts.

A second strategy to combat the process of global warming is the creation of entrepreneurial ecosystems focused on preserving the environment through the use of sustainable growth policies based on social innovation and collaborative entrepreneurship. It is necessary to design smart territories to achieve this goal and to improve competitiveness and attractiveness, through the use of public-private initiatives carried out by decision-makers to take advantage of their natural assets and history, while developing infrastructures, businesses, and managerial skills. In this respect, smart territories can be the solution for achieving sustainable growth without damaging the environment. Solution widely studied in the existing economic literature on this subject linked to environmental-related issues (Lanier et al., 2019; Lillebø et al., 2019; Mutani et al., 2019), territorial management planning strategies (Bellone & Geropanta, 2019), Spatio-temporal issues (Catlett et al., 2019), and tourism (Rodrígues & Virtudes, 2019).

Besides, productive resources and utility management is one of the vital strategies to minimize waste/losses and pollution, and it facilitates the development of a circular economy (Fan et al., 2019). While companies often use lean, 5S, and Kaizen processes to reduce the generation of waste to optimize the use of productive factors, in the public administration, the kaizen process (continuous improvement) is mainly carried out with a social purpose to offer a better level of life to society. The smaller the municipality, the easier it will be to implement this type of strategy, since its insertion into the process is less complicated.

In this respect, the choice of the village of El Boalo-Cerceda-Mataelpino (7,090 inhabitants) is given by having been awarded as the first Zero Waste Municipality of the Madrid Autonomous Community by the Zero Waste Europe network (www.zerowasteeurope.eu). The environmental awareness of the municipality has been increasing mainly due to that 16.8% of the municipal area is part of the ‘Sierra de Guadarrama’ National Park, and because the municipality had not stopped growing since the first census of the year 1900 when it had just 457 inhabitants. That is why the use of the circular economy is a powerful solution for sustainability (Inigo & Blok, 2019)

This work analyzes how a smart territory can be created by combining collaborative entrepreneurship inserted into public-private schemes, circular economy, cultural assets, and eco-friendly tourism focused on economic growth.

The goal of this book chapter is to describe how public-private collaboration can create sustainable and eco-friendly entrepreneurial ecosystems to achieve total preservation of the territory for future generations. This union of environmental sustainability and eco-friendly tourism focused on economic development to create social wealth is analyzed in the case of the municipality of El Boalo-Cerceda-Mataelpino, inserted into the ‘Sierra de Guadarrama’ National Park, one of the most prominent Southern European National Parks located in Spain.