The Monitoring Paradox in Sustainable Destination Management: A Computational Analysis of the Actionability Index Across Iberian INSTO Members

Coastal and island destinations increasingly rely on data-driven governance to manage seasonality, resource scarcity, overtourism, and climate risk. This article analyzes 30 official documents issued between 2017 and 2025 by nine Spanish and Portuguese Sustainable Tourism Observatories in the UN Tourism INSTO network. Rather than treating observatory language as verified policy implementation, the study uses computational content analysis to measure institutional discourse about monitoring and action. The Actionability Index (ActI), action-share, and log-ratio metrics are interpreted as exploratory, compositional text indicators, not direct evidence of governance effectiveness. Results show a negative document-level association between monitoring intensity and the ActI (r = −0.3951, p = 0.0307, alpha = 0.05), but denominator coupling and report-genre heterogeneity require a restrained interpretation: the pattern signals a monitoring-action imbalance that warrants follow-up validation rather than causal proof of a governance failure. Quartile-based profile labels are treated as sample-internal descriptors, with Barcelona interpreted as a boundary case whose action discourse is concentrated around tourism carrying capacity. A pre/post-2020 comparison is reported only as an unbalanced descriptive contrast. The contribution is a transparent, reproducible framework for auditing whether monitoring intelligence is connected to actionable discourse, together with explicit limits and validation priorities for future work.