Stakeholder perceptions of tourism carrying capacity in a Trans-Himalayan destination: A qualitative multi-zone investigation

Tourism carrying capacity (TCC) in ecologically and culturally fragile mountain destinations is increasingly contested as a governance challenge that transcends quantitative threshold calculation. This study examines how diverse stakeholders perceive, define, and experience TCC in Ladakh, India, a high-altitude Trans-Himalayan destination receiving over half a million visitors annually. Drawing on 42 phenomenological semi-structured interviews conducted across four spatial zones (Leh, Nubra Valley, Pangong Tso corridor, and Zanskar) and analysed using NVivo-assisted thematic analysis, five interconnected dimensions of carrying capacity stress are identified: infrastructural saturation, ecological fragility, cultural commodification, institutional inadequacy, and differential spatial vulnerability. Sentiment analysis of the interview corpus reveals significant variation in affective responses across stakeholder categories and across the tourist season, with monastery representatives and local residents expressing substantially higher negative sentiment than tourism entrepreneurs and government officials. The findings challenge the reductionist application of the Physical, Real, and Effective Carrying Capacity hierarchy to complex socio-ecological destination systems and argue for a contextualised, participatory, and adaptive TCC governance framework grounded in local ecological knowledge, culturally sensitive threshold indicators, and strengthened institutional coordination. The study addresses three interrelated research gaps, namely methodological, contextual, and conceptual, in the Indian Himalayan TCC literature and contributes to broader debates on overtourism governance, the Limits of Acceptable Change framework, and sustainable mountain tourism development in relation to SDG 11, SDG 15, and SDG 16.