A Sustainable Ecotourism Model: Integrating Forest Conservation, Environmental Protection, and Local Economic Well-Being
Abstract
Ecotourism is widely promoted as a development pathway that can simultaneously finance forest conservation, reduce environmental pressure, and raise local incomes. In practice, these three goals are usually pursued through separate policy instruments, and the literature remains fragmented across case studies that rarely explain how the goals reinforce or undermine one another. This study develops an integrative model that specifies the mechanisms linking forest conservation, environmental protection, and local economic well-being in ecotourism settings. Method: A systematic integrative review was conducted following PRISMA 2020 guidance. Forty records retrieved from the Consensus academic database through bilingual (English and Indonesian) queries were de-duplicated into a corpus of 29 peer-reviewed studies published between 2021 and 2026, which were coded and analysed through reflexive thematic synthesis. Five recurrent mechanisms were identified: governance and stakeholder synergy, community agency and local wisdom, benefit-sharing and livelihood diversification, ecological safeguards and restoration, and environmental education with valuation of ecosystem services. Economic benefits translate into conservation only when benefit-sharing is institutionalised and ecological limits are enforced. The proposed Integrated Forest–Environment–Economy Ecotourism (IFEE) model offers policymakers and destination managers a diagnostic framework for designing and evaluating forest-based ecotourism, particularly in tropical developing countries such as Indonesia
Keywords
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