Trade-offs between sustainable tourism development goals: An analysis of Tibet (China)

In the field of tourism development, decision-makers are often confronted with multiple goals regarding the tourism economy, environment and society. Taking Tibet (China) as a case study, the current paper proposes an innovative methodology for quantifying the trade-off between various tourism development goals, drawing on the Delphi method and goal programing. Our results indicate that Tibet's sustainable tourism development goals mainly consist of 10 subgoals and depend on nine decision-making variables. Depending on whether the greatest priority is given to economic, social or environmental goals, the practical implications are markedly different. We further examine changes in the subgoals and decision variables under each priority scenario. Our results allow us to recognize the key objectives involved in sustainable tourism development. This study also provides a good research framework for weighing up the priority that should be assigned to different development goals and making relevant decisions.