**3.2 Study setting**

Trysil is located in the south-east of Norway, close to the Swedish border in a mountainous and forested area. Trysil is Norway's biggest winter destination and offers two alpine ski-areas; Trysilfjellet and Fageråsen. The destination has about 6000 cabins, several hotels and campings and offers outdoor activities all year round. However, the peak of visitors arrives in winter while the shoulder and summer seasons are much less busy. Recently the destination has invested in a large network of mountain biking trails and climbing facilities to offer summer guests outdoor activities. The destination faces the challenge of having developed as an alpine ski-destination during the last 30 years, with high energy levels, many guests in the winter and a generally high environmental footprint. The motivation to get labeled as a sustainable destination is to reduce the negative impacts of mass tourism and offer a more balanced, all-year-round form of tourism that keeps the local community lively and attractive. The project management of the certification process is in the hands of the destination company. The municipality, a private consultant, and the certification agent (Innovation Norway) are part of the management team while the members of the destination company are project participants in the sustainable destination project.

The sustainable destination label is given out by Innovation Norway (IN), and it takes 2 years to realize the first round of certification. IN provides services such as supervision, materials, education, and a network of destinations that work with the same goal. The certification has operationalized the 17 sustainable development goals from the United Nations into 10 principles with 108 indicators [42].

### **3.3 Data sources**

#### *3.3.1 Interviews*

The informants were chosen through strategic sampling with additional snow-ball sampling, with time for unplanned/spontaneous interviews suggested by other respondents. In total 9 face-to-face interviews were conducted in 2017 with informants from businesses, municipalities and DMO. Additionally, we conducted online videointerviews with the national certification organization Innovation Norway, as well as Hanen. The latter offers an eco-certification at the business level. The main criteria for the selection of respondents at the case level were variation in types of tourism firms (nature-, culture and food-based, accommodation and size), local destination management, local governments and others involved in the certification process. The conducted interviews varied between 30 minutes and 2 hours in length. They were transcribed verbatim. **Table 1** shows the informants and their roles in destination Trysil.

## **3.4 Analytic methods**

The content analysis of the empirical material consisted of three main stages [43]; identifying analytic units, developing a coding scheme and assessing credibility. The initial analysis took place in Norwegian. We began by identifying and organizing relevant units of analysis by selecting only those textual passages referring to the certification process. Excluded passages consisted of descriptions of the organizational background and purpose or references to the destination that did not mention the certification process. In the remaining material, sections dealing with

*Barriers to Interorganizational Learning for Innovation: A Case Study of a Sustainable Tourism… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112555*


#### **Table 1.**

*Informants and their roles.*

learning, knowledge sharing, sustainability and innovation were noted (using English concepts). To develop the coding scheme, we looked for sensitizing concepts from the literature while being open for new concepts emerging from the data. We combined features present in data with extant theory [44] in order to understand specific instances ([45], p. 631). The abductive analysis followed three steps: (1) the application of an established interpretive rule (theory), (2) the observation of a surprising - in light of the interpretive rule - empirical phenomenon and (3) the imaginative articulation of a new interpretive rule (theory) that resolves the surprise ([46], p. 1269). First-order concepts were defined when looking for elements that were physically present in the material due to the interview questions based on constructs from the literature review. The next step was to engage in latent coding by conducting an interpretive reading of the symbolism underlying the physical data, which resulted in a set of second-order themes [43, 47]. Finally, a set of overarching dimensions were defined to facilitate the presentation of the emerging understanding.
