Sustainable tourism: a comprehensive literature review on frameworks and applications

Abstract

This paper aims to study the progress of research on Sustainable Tourism and to outline and identify the key disciplines, journals, articles and authors. This is carried out through a wide, in-depth, and structured examination of published scholarly papers. In recent decades, sustainable tourism has been one of the most significant subjects among academics and practitioners. In this paper, a classification scheme and a comprehensive literature review are presented in order to clarify, categorise, and interpret the current research on sustainable tourism definitions and applications. The classification scheme for this review contains 132 scholarly papers from 47 journals since the year 1993 up to 2013 categorised into 14 application areas. The five major topics are Paradigm, Sustainable Tourism Development, Market research and Economic, Policy-making, and Infrastructure. The scholarly papers are also sorted by (we suggest using the exact order used later in the paper) (1) year of publication; (2) publication journal; (3) subject area citations. It is hoped that this paper provides the needs of researchers and practitioners with easy references for sustainable tourism and its definitions and applications, and also presents future research opportunities.

Keywords:

• sustainable development
• tourism
• sustainable tourism
• literature review

JEL classification:

• Q01
• Q50
• Q56
• L83.