Jin-Chun Huang

Over the span of three decades, the development of rural tourism has substantially improved rural economies and the lives of rural residents; however, it has also negatively affected societies, cultures, and environments, which is not conducive to sustainable development. Motivated by the aim of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, the balanced development of economic, social, cultural, and environmental factors in rural tourism can only be achieved by analyzing the current problems of rural tourism on the basis of an overall system. Therefore, this study developed an overall evaluation system for analyzing the sustainable development of rural tourism. This system contains an indicator framework for sustainable development of rural tourism and an analytical mechanism for an improvement strategy constructed using a modified DANP-mV model. In this study, the evaluation system was applied to the empirical case study of Yudong Village in China. The empirical case study results show that social sustainable development (D₂) is not the first priority for improvement, although it exhibits the largest gap. Instead, environmental sustainable development (D₄), which exhibits a smaller gap, should receive higher priority for improvement because it is the root cause of social sustainable development (D₂). The overall improvement strategy for Yudong Village should follow this path: environmental sustainable development (D₄) → social sustainable development (D₂) → economic sustainable development (D₁) → cultural sustainable development (D₃). In addition to demonstrating the effectiveness of the rural tourism sustainable development evaluation system, the empirical case study also demonstrated that the system is capable of identifying the root causes of rural-tourism-related sustainability problems and contributing to the formulation of improvement strategies.

Global warming and extreme weather have increased most people’s awareness of the problem of environmental destruction. In the domain of sustainable development, environmental governance has received considerable scholarly attention. However, protecting and improving the environment requires not only substantial capital investment but also cooperation among stakeholders. Therefore, based on the network structure of stakeholders, the best–worst method (BWM) and modified Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje method were combined to form an environmental co-governance assessment framework that can be used to evaluate the effects of various policies and identify strategies for further improvement through data analysis (henceforth the BWM-mV model). This mechanism is not only useful for evaluating the effectiveness of environmental governance policies but also for generating suggestions to enhance these policies. Hence, the BWM-mV model is particularly suitable for local governments with limited resources in time, money, or labor. Pingxiang City Government is currently subject to such limitations and was therefore selected as the subject of an empirical case study. The results of this study revealed that the aspects (i.e., criteria) the Pingxiang City Government should urgently improve on pertain to a high-quality information communication platform (C₁₃) and smooth joint decision-making by stakeholders (C₂₄).