Complex adaptive governance for sustainable tourism villages: Explanatory insights from combined polycentric and chaos theoretical perspectives

Sustainable tourism villages face complex governance challenges because they must simultaneously support economic development, protect local culture, preserve ecological resources, and respond to changing social conditions. Existing studies have examined sustainable tourism governance mainly from administrative, community-based, or institutional perspectives, but less attention has been given to how distributed authority interacts with nonlinear adaptive dynamics in village-level governance systems. To address this gap, this study develops an integrated framework that combines polycentric governance theory and chaos theory. Using a quantitative explanatory design, survey data were collected from 590 stakeholders involved in tourism village governance across four regencies and one city in Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings indicate that institutional diversity has the strongest association with sustainable tourism village governance, followed by decentralization and local autonomy, bifurcation and cosmology, community participation, flexibility and adaptability, edge of chaos and the butterfly effect, and self-organization and strange attractors. The model yields a very high coefficient of determination, which suggests a close within sample fit between the proposed constructs and the observed perception data. This result is interpreted cautiously because the study is cross-sectional and several constructs are conceptually proximate. The study contributes to governance theory by showing that sustainable tourism village governance can be understood as both polycentric and complex-adaptive. Practically, the findings suggest that policymakers and tourism village managers should strengthen multi-actor coordination while maintaining flexibility to respond to uncertainty and local change.