The Triple Bottom Line in Practice: Measuring Environmental, Social, and Economic Outcomes of Ecotourism Villages in Eastern Indonesia
Abstract
The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) is widely invoked in sustainable tourism discourse, yet its empirical measurement in village-scale ecotourism—particularly in peripheral regions of the Global South—remains underdeveloped. Eastern Indonesia, comprising Nusa Tenggara, Maluku, and Papua, hosts a growing number of ecotourism villages (desa wisata) marketed as exemplars of sustainable development, but evidence of their actual environmental, social, and economic outcomes is uneven and methodologically inconsistent. This study aims to operationalize and apply a context-sensitive TBL measurement framework across five ecotourism villages in Eastern Indonesia: Wae Rebo (Flores), Praijing (Sumba), Banda Naira (Maluku), Sawinggrai (Raja Ampat), and Liang Ndara (West Manggarai). A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was adopted, combining 187 household surveys, 42 semi-structured stakeholder interviews, ecological field assessments at 23 sites, and secondary economic data from village governments and tourism cooperatives. Twenty-one indicators were aggregated into a Composite Sustainability Index (CSI) using min–max normalization and equal-weighted pillar averaging, complemented by qualitative validation. Findings reveal substantial inter-village heterogeneity: the highest CSI (0.74) was observed in Sawinggrai, where homestay rotation and customary marine governance produced balanced outcomes, while the lowest (0.51) occurred in Praijing, where economic dependence on external operators undermined social-cultural resilience. Across all sites, environmental performance outpaced socio-cultural performance, contradicting common assumptions that village ecotourism is socially inclusive by default. The study contributes a replicable, locally-calibrated TBL toolkit and advances theoretical debates on the measurability of sustainability in dispersed island geographies.
Keywords: Triple Bottom Line; ecotourism villages; Eastern Indonesia; sustainability indicators; desa wisata; mixed methods; composite index
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