Rethinking Sustainable Tourism in Vietnam: From Green Growth To Social Transformation

Sustainable tourism in Vietnam has traditionally been framed through the priorities of economic growth, environmental protection, and destination competitiveness. However, the rapid expansion of tourism in emerging destinations has generated increasing social tensions related to community inequality, heritage commodification, labor precarity, digital behavior, and governance fragmentation. These challenges reveal the limitations of environmentally centered sustainability models and suggest the need for a broader transformative approach. This study rethinks sustainable tourism in Vietnam by proposing a transition from “green growth” toward “social transformation.” Conceptually, social transformation is understood as a multidimensional restructuring process through which tourism reshapes community relations, cultural identity, governance systems, and collective well-being beyond conventional environmental and economic objectives. Methodologically, the study adopts a conceptual qualitative approach combining directed literature review, academic discourse analysis, and interpretive synthesis. Drawing upon international tourism scholarship and recent Vietnamese tourism studies, the article develops the Integrated Sustainable Tourism Transformation Framework (ISTTF), consisting of five interconnected dimensions: community transformation, heritage transformation, behavioral transformation, educational transformation, and governance transformation. The study argues that sustainable tourism should be understood not merely as environmental preservation, but as an integrated social process involving justice, participation, adaptive resilience, cultural legitimacy, and ethical destination development. The proposed framework contributes to transformative tourism scholarship by integrating fragmented dimensions of sustainability into a unified conceptual model applicable to emerging tourism destinations in Vietnam and other developing-country contexts.

sustainable tourism; social transformation; transformative tourism; tourism governance; community-based tourism; heritage tourism; Vietnam

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