From Transformative Tourism to Regenerative Futures: Reframing Sustainable Development, SDGs , and Human Transformation Toward 2050

ABSTRACT Current sustainable tourism research largely approaches the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through system‐level governance, impact mitigation, and behavioral compliance. In parallel, transformative tourism research demonstrates tourism's capacity to reshape tourists' perceptions, values, and well‐being, yet remains weakly theorized in relation to sustainable development outcomes. As a result, tourism scholarship lacks a coherent explanation of how human transformation can scale into durable socio‐ecological change. This study advances a conceptual breakthrough by proposing the transformative‐to‐regenerative pathways framework, which reconceptualizes transformative tourism experiences as a human‐centered leverage system for sustainable development. Drawing on an integrative bibliometric review and conceptual synthesis of 206 Scopus and Web of Science publications (1998–2025), the study identifies persistent fragmentation between transformation‐oriented and sustainability‐oriented research, and responds by theorizing their connection through multi‐level causal pathways. The framework specifies how experiential design mechanisms, cultural immersion, community empowerment, and technological integration activate psychological transformation, value and identity reorientation, and the diffusion of sustainable social practices. Importantly, the framework extends sustainability thinking beyond SDG instrumentalism by introducing a layered SDG linkage logic and articulating pathways toward regenerative living, relational ecology, and long‐horizon responsibility. Transcendence is theorized as a critical enabling process that allows tourism experiences to re‐situate the self within broader social, ecological, and more‐than‐human horizons. By reframing tourism as consciousness‐in‐practice rather than an economic sector alone, this study opens new theoretical and practical horizons for sustainable development research toward 2050, positioning tourism as a strategic arena for regenerative futures.