Publication Details
Abstract
Although the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) paradigm is increasingly applied to tourism, most existing assessments are perception-based or confined to the enterprise level, leaving destination managers without a transparent, replicable instrument for gauging how far ESG principles are actually implemented across a regional tourism system, or how the three dimensions relate to one another. This study develops a composite assessment methodology — the Tourism ESG Implementation Index (TEII) — comprising twelve indicators distributed across the environmental, social and governance dimensions, normalised by the min–max method and aggregated using dimension weights derived from an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) expert panel (n = 15). The methodology was approbated on the tourism sector of Bukhara Province, Uzbekistan — a UNESCO World Heritage destination within a country whose international arrivals rose from about 1 million in 2016 to 8.2 million in 2024 — through a structured field assessment of 146 tourism enterprises across the province's eleven districts and Bukhara city. The province recorded an overall TEII of 0.63, with the social sub-index highest (0.71), governance moderate (0.61) and the environmental sub-index lowest (0.57). District-level scores ranged from 0.74 in Bukhara city to 0.49 in peripheral districts, revealing pronounced spatial unevenness. Correlation and regression analysis confirmed that the three dimensions are not independent: all pairwise correlations were positive and significant (r = 0.51–0.61, p < 0.01), and governance implementation significantly predicted both environmental (β = 0.44, p < 0.001) and social (β = 0.39, p < 0.001) implementation, identifying governance as an enabling foundation. The study contributes a transferable diagnostic instrument and demonstrates empirically that the ESG dimensions of tourism reinforce one another and should be planned as an integrated system.