Financial sustainability in community-based and ecotourism

Financial sustainability remains one of the least theorised dimensions of community-based tourism (CBT) research. While substantial scholarship addresses the environmental and participatory governance dimensions of CBT, ecotourism, and allied forms of nature-based rural tourism, the question of how these enterprises generate, protect, and equitably distribute revenues has received comparatively limited and dispersed scholarly attention. Drawing on 188 peer-reviewed articles published between 1999 and 2026, retrieved from the Scopus database and screened following the PRISMA 2020 framework, this study combines bibliometric visualization analysis using Bibliometrix with a structured narrative synthesis to map the intellectual structure, thematic landscape, and temporal evolution of financial sustainability research in CBT. The analysis yields three main findings. First, scholarly output has accelerated sharply since 2022, with 35 articles published in 2025 alone, a growth that coincides with the COVID-19 pandemic, its aftermath, and a rising interest in resilience. Second, keyword co-occurrence and thematic mapping show that financial management is more closely associated with the environmental-conservation cluster than with the governance-stakeholder cluster; this is interpreted as a conceptual association in how the literature has been framed, not as evidence of theoretical separation or of intellectual fragmentation across the field. Third, a narrative synthesis of the most influential studies identifies three substantive debates that appear to have developed with limited cross-reference: the revenue-conservation tension, the governance architecture of benefit-sharing, and the financial resilience problem. On this basis, a bibliometrically motivated three-dimensional framework is proposed, comprising revenue generation capacity, financial governance quality, and financial resilience, together with five priority directions for future research.