Degrowth in the tourism sector is a recent field of study. And for the moment, little research has focused on degrowth in tourism in mountain areas. This article conducts a systematic literature review on this topic, considering both publications with a conceptual approach and empirical studies carried out on different types of destinations (urban, coastal, island, rural, etc.) in order to identify avenues for research in mountain areas. The results show that the number of publications has increased significantly since 2019. These publications draw on various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of the subject of tourism. After detailing the conceptual approaches, the analysis focused on empirical studies. It appears that mountain destinations are studied in 17% of publications, which mainly deal with European destinations. The scale of analysis is mainly local and the methods used are essentially qualitative. The Structural Topic Model was used to highlight five themes (overtourism and social movements, degrowth management and planning, community tourism, the role of entrepreneurs and resource dependency). The results of the studies referring to each of these themes were detailed. Subsequently, the application of the results of these case studies to mountain areas made it possible to establish a research agenda, focusing on the notion of trail dependency, the implementation of transport decarbonisation policies, the effectiveness of visitor management measures and rebound effects, and a comparative analysis of protest movements around tourism developments.
Clémence Perrin-Malterre (Wed,) studied this question.