Capturing Lessons for Sustainable Tourism Planning and Research: A Systematic Literature Review

Although sustainable tourism represents a positive approach for community development, its practical implementation is challenging. Given that there is no one institutional recipe that fits all cases, it is necessary to cumulate knowledge from lessons from isolated cases where a combination of institutional arrangements and context-specific characteristics showed to be - or not - successful for tourism management. We address this need by performing a systematic literature review, guided by the Couple Infrastructure Systems Framework, a multidisciplinary approach with an institutional theoretical basis and applied in the study of different socio-ecological systems but not yet for tourism. Around 57 papers were selected, coded and analyzed. This study contains theoretical contributions in illustrating the adaptation of the CISF to the tourism sector, identifying knowledge gaps in the sustainable tourism management literature, and proposing a research agenda to addresses these gaps.