Developing a resilience evaluation index for cultural heritage site: case study of Jiangwan Town in China

ABSTRACT

Considering the vulnerability of cultural heritage site from over-tourism, this paper develops a resilience evaluation index system to evaluate a cultural heritage site for sustainable tourism development. The system consists of 3 Level I sub-systems, socio-cultural, economic, and ecological ones, and 19 Level II indicators. Using Jiangwan town in China as a case, we calculate the resilience evaluation index during 2010–2014 and investigate the factors explaining the variation of this index over time. The results indicate that the degree of cultural inheritance and protection level of value characteristics are the main resilience determinants. Lastly, specific implications are proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism destination
• resilience evaluation index
• cultural heritage site
• socio-cultural indicators
• economic indicators
• ecological indicators
• resilience monitoring
• entropy method
• Delphi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by National Social Science Foundation of China (grant number 18BJY117).