Does sustainable tourism development enhance the prosperity of a destination? Evidence from stakeholder perceptions
Creators: name: Falatoonitoosi, Elham
Publisher: name: University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Year: 2020
Subjects: sustainable development
environmental sustainability
destination prosperity
hierarchical multiple regression
DEMATEL
convergent interviews
Sunshine Coast

description: This research examines stakeholders’ perceptions of the role of sustainable tourism development in enhancing the prosperity of a destination. Prosperity is gaining increasing attention as a factor within sustainability and as one of the five critical areas in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Prosperity is defined through five key dimensions: quality of life, sociocultural empowerment, environmental quality, economic growth, tourist satisfaction, and attractiveness of the destination. To analyse the impacts of sustainability on these key dimensions of prosperity, a set of 18 sustainability indicators were identified based on a developed hybrid model that combines results from a systematic literature search (SLS) and four-stage convergent interviews. From there, causality relationships (interdependencies) among sustainability issues were analysed to identify the influential sustainability issues in regional sustainable tourism development. Analysing the causality relationship between sustainability indicators identified ten influential sustainability issues associated with a target destination. According to the results, Sustainability education and training, followed by Government support for sustainability planning and programs, Sociocultural effects of tourism, Limiting the impacts of tourists’ activities, and Ecological conservation have the highest influence in regional sustainable tourism development within the contextual destination (Sunshine Coast, Australia). Identification of the influential sustainability issues through quantifying the relationships and interdependencies among the issues contributes to the theory of knowledge and practice. First, it reduces the impractical information for sustainability assessment while representing the effectiveness of each sustainability issue. Second, identifying the issues having a high impact on system development assists decision-makers to enhance the effectiveness of tourism planning.
description: The hybrid model for indicator selection can assist researchers in the early design and construction phase of regional sustainable tourism development.
description: The results also reveal that sustainable tourism development enhances destination prosperity in general and is a medium to strong predictor of key prosperity dimensions, particularly environmental quality and sociocultural empowerment. The results indicate a moderate positive relationship between sustainability and Tourist satisfaction. There was, however, no significant relationship between sustainability and Destination attractiveness. Investigating stakeholder attitudes towards sustainable tourism development, resulting in an increased understanding of how they perceive the impacts of sustainability on overall prosperity, can contribute to greater support for sustainable tourism development. Identifying stakeholder priorities regarding tourism and sustainable development suggests stakeholders perceive environmental and sociocultural issues to be of greater importance than economic issues. Understanding stakeholders’ awareness of sustainable tourism development as a desirable prerequisite for enhancing the prosperity of the region is another important outcome of this research. This finding contributes to the need for the re-evaluation of current approaches to tourism development planning and process.