Tourism sustainability frameworks have historically focused on impact mitigation, certification compliance, and incremental efficiency gains, often at the facility or project scale. While regenerative tourism has recently emerged as a promising paradigm oriented toward ecosystem restoration and community wellbeing, existing scholarship remains largely conceptual, with limited guidance on destination-scale operationalization, measurement, and governance. This study addresses this gap by developing an integrated analytical framework that embeds circular economy principles within regenerative tourism to support net-positive destination development. Adopting a structured conceptual review and framework-development approach, the study synthesizes literature on regenerative development, circular economy, destination sustainability, and community resilience, complemented by illustrative evidence from ecologically sensitive tourism destinations. The framework is organized around four interdependent pillars: Ecological Footprint Analysis, Circular Resource Systems, Community Resilience, and an Integrative Perspective linking ecological, social, and economic outcomes through feedback mechanisms. To operationalize regenerative outcomes, the study proposes SDG-aligned indicators and introduces a Regenerative Readiness Index to support destination-level assessment, benchmarking, and adaptive governance. The results demonstrate how integrating circular resource flows (water, energy, materials, and food systems) with ecological footprint monitoring and community-centred governance can reduce resource throughput, enhance local economic retention, strengthen socio-cultural resilience, and support ecosystem restoration. Rather than treating circular economy and regenerative tourism as parallel agendas, the framework formalizes their interaction through measurable pathways and feedback loops. The study advances tourism research by moving regenerative tourism from aspirational discourse toward an evaluable, policy-relevant, and destination-scale systems framework. The proposed model offers practical guidance for policymakers, destination managers, and communities seeking to transition from mitigation-oriented sustainability toward regenerative, net-positive tourism aligned with global sustainability and biodiversity goals. Not applicable
Das et al. (Thu,) studied this question.