Mapping gender and environmental sustainability in tourism research

Environmentally sustainable tourism requires integrating social inclusion, climate resilience, and environmental governance. Although gender equality is firmly embedded within global sustainability frameworks, the integration of gender perspectives into environmental sustainability research in tourism remains scattered. This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the gender–environment interaction within tourism research. Drawing on a dataset of 810 peer-reviewed articles indexed in Scopus (1998–2025), the study employed Biblioshiny (R) and VOSviewer to examine publication trends, citation structures, co-authorship networks, thematic clusters, and conceptual evolution over time. The findings reveal that sustainability and ecotourism constitute the dominant organizing paradigms of the field; in addition, gender studies have experienced a continuing and growing body of work, particularly related to community-based tourism and development. Although there have been significant increases in gender studies and studies of gender-responsive tourism development in recent years, there remains little or no convergence at the theoretical level (conceptual and factorial) between environmental assessment and gender-responsive tourism development studies. Thus, both fields continue to develop independently rather than progressing toward an integrated framework for sustainability. Through mapping the intellectual architecture and identifying structural fragmentation, this research has identified areas of critical deficiency in interdisciplinary sustainability discourse. It has also established the need for governance-related frameworks that relate gender relations to environmental decision-making within tourism systems. The results contribute to advancing more inclusive and theoretically consistent sustainability research within tourism and support stronger alignment with integrated sustainability goals.