Slow Food movement in gastronomy-based destination management: Case of Hasankeyf

The Slow Food movement, which supports healthy, fair and clean production, has taken its place in sustainable destination management in parallel with the increasing interest and demand for gastronomy tourism. The success of the Slow Food movement emerges in the efforts of the relevant stakeholders to manage the processes with an understanding of effective management and the awareness of joint action. In order to create an effective destination management, stakeholders need to act in harmony on issues such as communication, planning, coordination, leadership, cooperation, information sharing, trust and commitment. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to investigate the awareness of regional stakeholders in Hasankeyf, the most important cultural tourism destination in Mesopotamia, towards the Slow Food movement. In line with this purpose, the research population was determined as regional stakeholders and data were obtained from 385 regional stakeholders using judgmental sampling method. The Slow Food Awareness scale developed by Ozgen, Nabiyeva and Pektaş (2019) was used to analyze the awareness of regional stakeholders towards the Slow Food movement. SPSS and AMOS programs were used for validity and reliability analyses. As hypothesis tests, Independent Sample t-test was used for pairwise comparisons and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test was used for three or more comparisons. The findings reveal that while the public sector and local governments have high awareness of the Slow Food movement, local people and tourism operators have insufficient knowledge. At the end of the research, the theoretical contributions of the results to the literature are included and practical recommendations are made for destination stakeholders. Keywords: Gastronomy, Destination management, Slow Food movement, Hasankeyf