Rethinking Sustainable Tourism in Vietnam: From Green Growth to Social Transformation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55578/jedip.2606.008Keywords:
sustainable tourism, social transformation, heritage tourism, community-based tourism, Vietnam, tourism governanceAbstract
Sustainable tourism in Vietnam has often been framed through green growth, environmental protection, and destination competitiveness. While these priorities remain important, they are insufficient for addressing the social tensions generated by rapid tourism development, including unequal benefit distribution, symbolic community participation, heritage commodification, labor vulnerability, digitally mediated tourist behavior, and fragmented governance. This article rethinks sustainable tourism in Vietnam through the lens of social transformation. Drawing on a conceptual qualitative approach that combines directed literature review, academic discourse analysis, and interpretive synthesis, the study develops the ISTTF. The framework consists of five interrelated dimensions: community transformation, heritage transformation, behavioral transformation, educational transformation, and governance transformation. Rather than presenting these dimensions as separate themes, the ISTTF conceptualizes them as relational processes through which tourism reshapes agency, memory, norms, capacity, and institutional coordination within destination systems. The article argues that sustainable tourism should not be understood only as environmental management or green economic growth, but as a broader process of social restructuring involving justice, cultural legitimacy, responsible behavior, adaptive learning, and collaborative governance. By clarifying the theoretical distinction between green growth and social transformation, the study contributes to sustainable tourism scholarship and offers a context-sensitive framework for Vietnam and other emerging destinations facing similar tensions between tourism growth, sustainability, and social justice.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Nguyen Tan Thanh, Pham Duc Toan (Author)
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