Governance Legitimacy Deficit in Indonesian Sustainable Cultural Tourism: An Application of SSM‐Based Action Research Across Yogyakarta, Bali and Lombok

Sustainable tourism policy in Indonesia is nominally inclusive but operationally exclusionary, as community‐based enterprises across Yogyakarta, Bali and Lombok are systematically denied eco‐certification, green financing and market access despite already meeting the sustainability standards these instruments reward. This paper attributes this failure to a governance legitimacy deficit, produced when governance instruments draw motivation, control, knowledge and legitimation boundaries that exclude community operators by design, compounded by prior research treating operators as informants rather than worldview holders. The study integrates Soft Systems Methodology with Action Research (SSM‐AR) dual imperatives framework, engaging 24 intensive and 89 broader community participants across three inquiry phases. Phase 1 surfaced community worldviews through rich pictures converging on a shared wall metaphor across sites; Phase 2 developed seven contrasting root definitions locating the deficit structurally; Phase 3 produced three pilot interventions addressing the knowledge, motivation and control boundaries, achieving outcomes formal instruments had failed to deliver. The study contributes the governance legitimacy deficit as a generalisable analytical category, an SSM‐AR application protocol grounded in the Indonesian SSM‐AR tradition, and the Community‐Centred Sustainable Tourism Architecture (CCSTA), a four‐component intervention framework with empirical pilot evidence.