Stakeholder Conflicts in Low-Carbon Tourism: A Process-Oriented Framework

Low-carbon tourism initiatives frequently generate stakeholder conflicts, even when sustainability goals are widely shared. This study examines how such conflicts arise and propagate in heritage tourism, using Quanzhou Ancient City, China, as the focal case. Findings show that government officials, tourism operators, residents, and tourists hold divergent cognitive, emotional, and behavioural orientations toward low-carbon policies. These divergences become visible as interlinked interlinked structural, value, relationship, information, and interest conflicts. Within China's vertical-departmental (tiao–kuai) governance system, participants described conflicts as interacting across governance arenas and stakeholder relationships. This study contributes a process- grounded framework of triggering, inducement, manifestation, and transmission for explaining conflict emergence, intensification, and circulation in sustainable heritage tourism.