Abstract
The sustainability approach applied to tourism has been taking shape as a dominant paradigm in tourism research, as well as becoming a requirement to achieve tourism competitiveness. This paper focuses specifically on the application of both concepts to protected areas, as tourist destinations. A bibliometric approach is adopted to provide information about the patterns and trends in the accumulation of knowledge related to this field, as well as to map its social, conceptual, and intellectual structure. Both evaluative and relational techniques are used to analyse the papers published until August 2019 and collected in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. The results indicate that the research field has experienced significant growth in the last decade, with institutions of the USA and Australia as stimuli of scientific progress in this field. This study finds eight thematic clusters, although there is subject dispersion within each cluster, linked to the emerging and multidisciplinary nature of the field. Based on the working lines open, the study also identifies possible future approaches, linked to the incorporation of the perspectives and objectives of the different stakeholders, and the development of indicators to monitor and control dimensions of interest.
Highlights
When a long-term, dynamic vision of tourist destinations and their competitiveness is adopted, or when the negative effects of tourism on the territories where it is developed and on their local communities are recognized, sustainability is an approach which is nearly always present, either explicitly or implicitly [1,2].Likewise, it underlies the definitions of destination competitiveness, which by consensus, have been accepted as comprehensive and of a broad scope [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
We review two specific aspects of the previous literature that support this present study: (1) Related to the application of sustainability to the management of tourist destinations, the construct created successfully and with a broad influence is “Sustainable tourism”; its broad impact has led to it being the object of several bibliometric analyses; the first subsection of the second section deals with reviewing these analyses; (2) the second part of the literature review considers the theoretical development of protected areas and the assessment of their competitiveness as tourist destinations
As a cross-cutting question to answer, we asked ourselves whether research in sustainability and tourism competitiveness in protected areas followed the guidelines of research in sustainable tourism
Summary
When a long-term, dynamic vision of tourist destinations and their competitiveness is adopted, or when the negative effects of tourism on the territories where it is developed and on their local communities are recognized, sustainability is an approach which is nearly always present, either explicitly or implicitly [1,2]. Likewise, it underlies the definitions of destination competitiveness, which by consensus, have been accepted as comprehensive and of a broad scope [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. It was maintained that “given that the term sustainable development did not enter the lexicon until 1987, it was still too soon to say if anything created since is truly sustainable or not” [31]
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