New directions in sustainable tourism research

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to expand our understanding of sustainable tourism research given that both researchers and policymakers consistently question the effectiveness of sustainable tourism and its practices, applications and practical adoption. Design/methodology/approach The aim of the research was to provide an update on previous studies by examining how sustainable tourism research has progressed in the five intervening years since Ruhanen et al. completed their 25-year bibliometric analysis. Findings This paper provides insights into how sustainable tourism research has developed over the 30 years since the publication of the Brundtland report. It shows that over the past five years, the field has matured to place greater emphasis on climate change, modeling, values, behavior and theoretical progression. Research limitations/implications Future research in the field should aim to better understand the methods and analysis techniques being used in sustainable tourism, as well as how sustainable tourism and climate change policy and actions translate into policy and practice. Originality/value Bibliometrics and text mining shows that 30 years after the Brundtland report, sustainable tourism research continues to grow exponentially, with evidence that the field is starting to mature by broadening its horizons and focusing on more relevant, big-picture and hard-hitting topics, such as climate change.

Using Bibliometric Methods to Shed Light on the Concept of Sustainable Tourism

“…The utility of bibliometric analyses has led to them being widely spread across all disciplines. Sustainable tourism has not been alien to the emergence of this method, as bibliometric analyses have only increased in the last few years [11,14,15,23,24,45]. Nevertheless, our contribution differs significantly from previous bibliometric studies in sustainable tourism research, mainly for two reasons.…”

“…This growth in the academic discussion demonstrates the rising interest in sustainable tourism as a field of knowledge [15,16,19,23,24], which is reflected in the expanding literature, with more than 5000 publications in sustainable tourism to date [25]. However, this unfinished debate justifies the need to deepen the study of the evolution of the term; on the one hand, to identify all research papers written in sustainable tourism across all scientific journals, and on the other, to better understand the conceptual structure of this area of knowledge "under construction".…”

Culture, Technology, and Tourism (CTT) Theory:An Ontological Perspective

“…In sustainable tourism, agents are an essential part of the planning process, that local people are what, for whom, and why it makes sense of the process (Padin 2012) Besides, sustainable tourism has come to be widely embraced by the academic community as a broad conceptualization that embraces environmental issues in conjunction with social, cultural, economic and political issues (Bramwell et al 2017). Sustainable tourism development, nature-based tourism, protected area tourism, island destinations, and ecotourism were also popular topics or contextual applications for practice-based research; all of which are directly related to sustainable tourism (Ruhanen et al 2019). Sustainable tourism has also regularly been linked with the preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, the promotion of human welfare and inter-and intra-cultural equity, public participation in tourism-related decision-making and access by all stakeholders to socio-cultural tourism outcomes; sustainability can be policy or development goal for most types of tourism activity or environment, regardless of scale (Bramwell 2015;Lane 2009;Moscardo 2008;UNEP and UNWTO 2005).…”

A modernism‐based interpretation of sustainable tourism

“…In 2018, a similar search yielded 8,500 results in Web of Science (Sánchez‐Cañizares et al, ). Regardless of the sheer volume of research, the conceptual vagueness and hereby implicit practical implications of sustainable tourism make it a controversial subject (Bramwell, Higham, Lane, & Miller, ; Ruhanen, Moyle, & Moyle, ).…”

“…In 2018, a similar search yielded 8,500 results in Web of Science (Sánchez-Cañizares et al, 2018). Regardless of the sheer volume of research, the conceptual vagueness and hereby implicit practical implications of sustainable tourism make it a controversial subject (Bramwell, Higham, Lane, & Miller, 2017;Ruhanen, Moyle, & Moyle, 2019). Butler (1999) addressed the ambiguity of sustainable tourism, which had resulted in a certain label or rhetoric being associated with the concept worldwide (Hardy, Beeton, & Pearson, 2002) and in circular discussions in academia, not because it lacked a definition but because it had too many (Butler, 1999).…”