Designing sustainability changes in a tourist accommodation context from a systems perspective

Pro-sustainability changes are slow and incremental at best in the tourism sector. Research on the topic can take the form of secondary data (e.g., content analysis of strategic documents, social media posts), survey-based intent studies (e.g., willingness to pay), survey-based studies of self-reported behaviors, observation of actual behaviors (e.g., benchmarking studies), lab-based experimental manipulations of measurable behaviors, and, finally, in situ, or field-based, experimental manipulations of measurable behaviors. The latter are some of the rarest studies and are held up as the gold standard for changing behaviors by providing evidence-based, measurable, and actionable sustainability interventions for tourism businesses. This study draws inspiration from a 4-year program of action research into pro-sustainability changes in tourist accommodations. It questions whether any of these approaches are sufficient for changing sustainability-oriented behaviors. This questioning extends to whether the theoretical approaches that underpin even “gold standard experiments” capture the operational contexts of accommodation businesses. It proposes instead that a scaffolded approach, built from a systems map of the theories, tools, experimental findings, interviews with stakeholders and operational context is necessary to create sustainability transformations in tourism businesses. This is a radical departure from the dependent/independent variable approach adopted in traditional scientific methods and that requires a different ontological approach to the science of sustainability. The study has implications for contextualizing intervention-based experimental studies within a wider system of influential factors within tourist accommodations.