A New Perspective on Sustainable Tourism Practice using Systematically Co-Created Customized “Toolkits”: A Design Science Approach

Sustainable tourism quality control tools support businesses in building sustainability and resilience. A longstanding challenge is determining how tools can be leveraged for optimal engagement. However, inadequate attention has been given to developing and testing theory-driven solutions to address this challenge. This study addresses this gap by creating, testing, and evaluating the efficacy of systematically co-created customized toolkits in encouraging sustainability engagement. This is achieved by applying an original framework that fuses design science and diffusion of innovations theory across four studies involving diverse toolkit users (16), long-term engagement (~2 years), and multiple qualitative methods (interviews (20), workshops (5), site visits, material review, participant observation). The resultant toolkit encourages engagement, capacity building, and enables users to measure, monitor, report, and act on context-relevant sustainability issues. Contributing to theory, method, and practice, this work produces a replicable toolkit co-creation framework, new theoretical characteristics that facilitate user-engagement, and propositions for co-creating toolkits.