The Evaluation of Sustainable Tourism Development by Analytic Hierarchy Process and Fuzzy Set Theory: An Empirical Study on the Green Island in Taiwan

Sustainable tourism development (STD) has recently become a tourism management guideline. STD meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting and enhancing opportunities for the future. It is envisaged as leading to management of all resources in such a way that economic, social and aesthetic needs can be fulfilled while maintaining cultural integrity, essential ecological processes, biological diversity and life support systems (World Tourism Organization, 2004, Concepts & Definitions: Sustainable Development of Tourism Conceptual Definition. Retrieved 12 August 2004 from http://www.world-tourism.org/frameset/frame_sustainable.html). The purpose of this study is to propose an evaluation procedure of STD and illustrate how it can be applied empirically to a specific destination. Green Island in Taiwan, which lies in the Pacific Ocean, was selected to act as our empirical case due to its rich resources but threatened sustainability. First, we collected indicators of STD from the literature about small islands. Second, the Delphi technique was used to refine and identify the final indicators for STD evaluation according to the characteristics of our study case. Third, we calculated the criteria weights by applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process after constructing the evaluation criteria hierarchy. Finally, the measurement of performance corresponding to each criterion was conducted under the setting of fuzzy set theory. The results illustrate that our empirical case still needs more work in order to achieve its goal of sustainable tourism development. We also provide some managerial implications for the stakeholders such as tourism authorities, tourism businesses, local communities and academics.