Abstract
Robust literature on sustainable tourism development has emerged globally both in economically developed and emerging economies. Over the past several decades, policymakers and business practitioners increasingly acknowledge that the long-term development and sustainability of tourism destinations require clear guidelines and direction. The impetus for sustainable tourism development has become ever more urgent as a result of dual trends of climate change and massification of the global tourism industry. The current research review used science mapping techniques to examine 1596 Scopus-indexed documents published on sustainable tourism development. The objectives of the review were to document the size, growth, and global distribution of this literature, identify its key journals, authors, and documents, highlight emerging topics, and illuminate the underlying intellectual structure of this literature. The review also provides guidelines for scholars to develop research that can aid in future sustainable tourism development.
Highlights
Tourism development has been a topic of interest among scholars for more than 100 years [1]
The establishment of the United Nation’s the sustainable development goals highlighted the need for research, policy, and practice on tourism development to incorporate economic, social, and environmental dimensions. This has resulted in the conceptualization of the tourism life cycles, as well as models of sustainable tourism development [5,6,7,8]
These cases illustrate how unsustainable tourism can result in depletion of the very natural resources and wonders of the world that attract tourists in the first place
Summary
Tourism development has been a topic of interest among scholars for more than 100 years [1]. Recent examples include the negative effects of human waste polluting the bay and threatening coral reefs on Boracay Island in the Philippines, and the impact of mass tourism on the ancient pyramids at Giza in Egypt These cases illustrate how unsustainable tourism can result in depletion of the very natural resources (e.g., coral beaches) and wonders of the world (e.g., pyramids) that attract tourists in the first place. Scholars have documented how tourism initiatives often fail to develop sustainable income-producing enterprises for local populations This leads to short-term exploitation of human and natural resources, and a failure to develop local capacity needed to sustain long-term success [2,5,10,11]. Common to these examples is the observation that unsustainable tourism invariably ‘kills the goose that lays the golden egg’
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