Operationalising Tourism Sustainability at the Destination Level: A Systems Thinking Approach Along the SDGs

The adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set the strategic vision for the next decade. Yet, their operationalisation, more so, at the tourism industry and destination level is fraught with challenges leaving destination managers and tourism officials to appeal for meaningful and effective decision support tools. This paper addresses the academic and institutional recommendations for monitoring and implementing the SDGs in the tourism sector. It introduces a systems thinking framework (the Tourism Sustainability Assessment Framework (TSAF)) for delineating the dependencies and dynamics of variables and monitoring indicators in a tourism industry versus tourism destination ecosystem of relationships. The TSAF proposes a roadmap for integrating information and data from the various nationally adopted tourism statistics frameworks to effectuate the assessment of tourism sustainability. A comparison along with the SDG indicators then accentuates the importance and necessity for industry-specific, effective units of measurement.