An Examination on the Challenges Encountered in Implementation of Sustainable Ecotourism: Evidence from the Bangladesh Sundarbans

Sustainable ecotourism has been widely promoted as a strategy to harmonize biodiversity conservation with socio- economic development in protected areas. Despite this, the effectiveness of implementation remains questioned in ecologically fragile regions. This study examines the significant challenges in implementing sustainable ecotourism in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, from a multi- stakeholder governance perspective and incorporating stakeholder theory, political ecology, and environmental justice. The study embraces a qualitative research design based on 27 semi-structured interviews, including 15 key informant interviews (KIIs) and 12 in-depth interviews with policymakers, tour operators, community members, and academic experts. Existing studies predominantly focus on economic valuation, conservation consequences, or descriptive policy analysis. Despite this, there is a lack of empirically balanced, multi-stakeholder research that methodologically examines governance challenges at the level of implications through a theoretical lens. The findings of this study indicate that sustainable ecotourism in the Sundarbans is constrained by fragmented institutional governance, symbolic stakeholder participation, inequitable distribution of economic benefits, and weak environmental monitoring and regulatory enforcement. Evidence further demonstrates that ecotourism practices that deviate from sustainability principles, alongside over-commercialization, overcrowding, insufficiently skilled personnel, and climate-change vulnerabilities, exacerbate ecological and social risks. This study contributes to the knowledge of ecotourism by unifying governance, power, and justice frameworks within the context of Global South mangrove ecology. Policy implications highlight the need for co-management institutions, community-based ecotourism models, carrying-capacity-based tour regulation, and climate-adaptive tourism governance to achieve socially equitable and environmentally sustainable outcomes.