After nearly three decades of development, sustainable tourism has been widely recognized in tourism policy practice and tourism research. In recent years, scholars have paid more and more attention to the topic of sustainable tourism policy research. The purpose of this paper is to analyze its development process and extract its research subject framework for reference in future research. This paper uses the systematic review method and the literature co-citation network analysis to classify the theme of sustainable tourism policy research into six categories, including: Sustainable tourism policy stakeholders, sustainable tourism policy implementation, sustainable tourism and climate policy, sustainable tourism indicators and planning, sustainable concepts in tourism policy, and the role of sustainable tourism policy. The development and implementation of sustainable tourism policies are an effective response to global environmental and sustainable development challenges. However, the current sustainable tourism policy is often economic-growth oriented, which has theoretical differences with sustainable development. At the same time, the research focus of scholars is on the impact of policies on the sustainable development of tourism, while the research on the formation process of policies and governance behaviors in the sustainable development of tourism is not enough.
Guo et al. (Thu,) studied this question.