From Firm to Place: A Systematic Review of Regenerative Tourism and the Shift to Destination-Level Impact Assessment, 2024–2026
Keywords:
regenerative tourism, destination stewardship, community wellbeing, doughnut economics, destination indicators, degrowth, attribution distance, place-based governanceAbstract
Sustainable tourism has historically been assessed at the level of the firm. A hotel reduced its energy use, an operator offset its emissions, a restaurant sourced locally, and the sum of such improvements was taken to constitute a sustainable destination. Between 2024 and 2026 a substantial body of scholarship has challenged this composition assumption, arguing that the appropriate unit of evaluation is the place, and that the appropriate criterion is not reduced harm but net contribution to the ecological and social systems on which the destination depends. This review synthesises thirty-seven peer-reviewed studies published between 2024 and 2026 to establish what regenerative tourism scholarship has achieved, what its critics have established, and whether the field possesses the measurement apparatus its ambitions require. Critical thematic synthesis identifies five clusters: the conceptualisation and contestation of regeneration; community wellbeing and host quality of life as the evaluative unit; destination stewardship and the transformation of destination management organisations; Indigenous and community-led governance; and destination-level indicators and carrying capacity. The review proposes the Place-Level Accountability Framework, which distinguishes four ascending orders of evaluative claim from firm-level efficiency to system-level contribution, and introduces the construct of attribution distance to describe the widening gap between an intervention and the system-level outcome it claims, and the measurement difficulty this creates. The review finds a field whose conceptual production has substantially outrun its empirical and metrological base, with no agreed destination-level regenerative indicator set, a documented three to four-fold divergence among commercial market estimates, and no verified peer-reviewed case of a destination operating a doughnut-economics dashboard. Six propositions are advanced.
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