Integrated Sustainable Tourism Governance in Indonesia: Evidence from a Mixed-Methods Review and Stakeholder Analysis

Abstract

Indonesia’s tourism sector has significant economic, socio-cultural, and environmental potentials, but its sustainable development is constrained by fragmented governance, overlapping institutional mandates, uneven regional capacity, and limited stakeholder participation. Prior studies have largely explored decentralisation, destination governance, stakeholder collaboration, and sustainable tourism separately, leaving a critical gap in understanding how the fragmentation of governance operates across administrative levels, sectors, political periods, and geographical areas simultaneously. This study addresses this gap through a mixed-methods design combining bibliometric analysis, qualitative thematic synthesis, and stakeholder validation. Using bibliometric and thematic analyses of 165 articles retrieved from the Scopus database, we mapped the intellectual structure of tourism governance research and identified the main drivers, dimensions, consequences, and mechanisms of governance integration. The review findings were then contextualised and validated through semi-structured interviews with four purposively selected key informants with relevant expertise in Indonesian tourism governance. The findings identify four interlinked dimensions of governance fragmentation, namely vertical policy misalignment, horizontal and cross-sectoral fragmentation, temporal policy discontinuity, and spatial inequality in tourism development. Add to these dimensions overlapping regulations, unclear institutional responsibilities, varying institutional capacities, fragmented tourism data systems, competing stakeholder interests, and limited opportunities for meaningful community participation. The study proposes an Integrated Sustainable Tourism Governance Framework that focuses on policy coherence, multi-level coordination, institutional role clarity, stakeholder co-creation, interoperable data systems, policy continuity, and adaptive accountability. The framework provides theoretically sound and contextually sensitive guidance for enhancing inclusive, resilient and sustainable tourism development in Indonesia