Sequencing culture-ecology governance for Indigenous ecotourism: Delphi-AHP priorities from Chunri Township, Taiwan

Indigenous ecotourism studies identify cultural, ecological and community concerns, but provide limited guidance on how these conditions should be prioritised when governance capacity is constrained. This study develops a place-based decision-support framework for sequencing Indigenous ecotourism governance in Chunri Township, a Paiwan traditional territory in southern Taiwan. The framework brings Indigenous self-determination and relational culture-ecology into dialogue with the accountability principles of the Global Reporting Initiative, the tourism-specific criteria of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council and the Sustainable Development Goals. A two-round modified Delphi process involving five purposively selected experts refined 30 candidate indicators to 25. Pairwise comparisons provided by 17 experts were subsequently aggregated using the geometric mean and analysed through the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Cultural development (0.320887) and environmental development (0.262165) ranked first and second, respectively, and the aggregated dimension matrix demonstrated acceptable consistency (CI = 0.023937; CR = 0.02137). These findings support a contingent governance sequence in which culturally authorised ecological limits precede social coordination, local benefit retention and institutional monitoring. The study proposes a context-sensitive mid-range theory of Indigenous ecotourism governance in which culture and ecology constitute interdependent sources of legitimacy rather than instrumental inputs to tourism growth.