Sustainable development within the scientific tourism research: from the uncritical assimilation to the fad decline in Brazil?

Abstract

This article presents an investigation into how the term "sustainable development"(SD) was employed by authors of the tourism sector in the Portuguese language. For this, we carried out a quantitative analysis of 575 articles published in 31 journals during the period 1992-2016, which contained the term "sustainable development"and, or the words "sustainable"and, or "sustainability". In general, it was observed that the use of these terms had an evolutionary process, being possible to identify periods of emergence (1992-2000), growth (2001-2008), peak (2009), stagnancy / oscillation (2010-2013) and decline (after 2014). In a second phase of the research, a qualitative analysis was conducted of 46 articles that quoted the SD term in the title or in the keywords and studied an area of Brazil. Contrary to the results found by other authors, there was a predominance of articles that used qualitative approaches rather than quantitative and mixed approaches. There is evidence to suggest that there was some uncritical assimilation of the terms by some articles whilst the disuse of the terms may also be due to the emergence of new ones. Thus, future studies will confirm if research on sustainability and sustainable tourism resemble a fad or if new approaches will rise to renew or develop these concepts furthermore.