Turismo sustentável: Há caminho para estratégias eficazes de governação?

Abstract

The present work intends to reflect on the proportion of academic works (existing in the Portuguese open access repository - RCAAP) that uses indicators to outline new sustainable tourism strategies. And which implications may result from the scope of academic research in the area. A selection made in accordance with the proposed objectives gathered 70 works (including master and doctoral studies, scientific papers and reports). A qualitative analysis is developed with the Nvivo software, whose coding is one of the techniques helping the collected documents to make sense. Content is then codified into main themes (nodes). The analysis lays on the interaction between nodes (themes) and cases (documents), through questions (queries) based on the proposed objectives. It appears that most works do not address indicators of tourism sustainability and the few ones to do it are more descriptive. The academic community, with its research centers, has a crucial role to play in encouraging empirical studies on sustainability indexes and methods of defining them. The creation and monitoring of such measures, accessible and shared by the actors involved, is the path to an assertive sustainable development of this important sector of activity in the face of its current challenges.