Evaluation and performance measurement are established elements in modern public sector governance. These procedures aim at generating information about the merit and worth of policies, programs and strategies in comparison to explicit standards and indicators. Since the late 1960s, evaluation has developed considerably and functions nowadays as means to improve and control public service management, to legitimise political decisions and policy outputs and to ensure democratic enlightenment.

While evaluation is conceptually well recognised inside the strategic tourism planning literature, there has been relatively little empirical investigation of this planning cycle component. This thesis examines therefore the nature of evaluation in Finland’s tourism strategies from a public policy perspective. Empirical materials were collected in 2018 and consist of the current Finnish national, regional and two local tourism strategies in addition to five semi-structured expert interviews.

The qualitative content analysis reveals that Finnish tourism strategies are not evaluated in the conventional sense of policy and program evaluation. Tourism strategies are a product of indicative planning and as such, there is no prescribed procedure of how plans have to be evaluated. Instead, evaluation and monitoring processes of the Finnish tourism strategies are led by internal steering groups. The degree of formalisation and depth of evaluative actions vary across the examined cases and are determined by the organisational culture of the issuing tourism organisation and the leadership of individual planners.

Ex ante evaluation, that seeks to determine appropriateness and effectiveness of the strategy though extensive stakeholder consultation, dominates. Goal-attainment monitoring is undertaken within key stakeholder meetings and only for Finland’s national tourism strategy is a systematic framework for reporting the stage of implementation employed. Central in monitoring is a set of economic indicators that are congruent to the strategic growth objectives in many tourism plans. Thorough ex post evaluation is not well developed. These research results facilitate a deeper understanding of strategic tourism planning processes and the current measurement dimensions of tourism in Finland. The future need for more extensive evaluations is particularly discussed with respect to overtourism and climate change.