Mapping a Sustainable and Responsible Tourism Paradigm: A Bibliometric and Citation Network Analysis

Tanja Mihalic,Abbas Abbasi,Sahar Mohamadi,Lóránt Dénes Dávid

doi:10.3390/su13020853

Abstract

Sustainable tourism as a concept, and responsible tourism as its successful implementation, represent two major challenges for researchers in different academic fields and for tourism stakeholders in destinations responsible for sustainable tourism planning, policies, actions, and outcomes. This paper provides a bibliometric inventory of research published in the field of sustainable and responsible tourism (SRT). The results identify the publications on SRT; author cooperation between countries and their nodes; the disciplinary areas of SRT and the influential works, journals, and authors; and the bibliometric clusters. The aim of the study was to determine whether SRT has merged into a single “responsustainable” tourism discourse that could shift the mainstream paradigm of sustainable tourism towards the full content of SRT. The analysis was unable to confirm this shift towards an expanded paradigm of SRT but the results do indicate that SRT will remain an important area of tourism research for the foreseeable future.

Highlights

In 1987, the United Nations (UN) World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) published the report Our Common Future [1]
The concept was widely accepted by governments and organizations, industry, and academia, and became popular in tourism research and practice, tourism was hardly mentioned in the original report
This paper provided a detailed account of developments in the areas of sustainable and responsible tourism

Summary

Introduction

In 1987, the United Nations (UN) World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) published the report Our Common Future [1]. The report defined and popularized the concept of sustainable development. The concept was widely accepted by governments and organizations, industry, and academia, and became popular in tourism research and practice, tourism was hardly mentioned in the original report. The concept of sustainable tourism has become widely disseminated among tourism stakeholders. Tourism academia and the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) have defined sustainable tourism and published many recommendations and manuals on how to deal with sustainability in tourism [2,3]. A balanced approach to the three pillars of sustainability—economic, socio-cultural and natural—has been proposed. Due to the too slow and ineffective penetration of sustainability in tourism practice, many tourism researchers have proposed to expand the narrower three-pillar approach to include triggers for sustainability implementation. A new aspect of responsibility or “sustainability in action” has been added to the main conceptual understanding of sustainable tourism [5–7]

Objectives

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion