Environmental Governance of a Mass Tourism Destination: An Analytic Hierarchy Process Assessment of Sustainable Tourism Policy Implementation in Badung Regency, Bali, Indonesia

Abstract

Badung Regency concentrates the heaviest tourism load in Indonesia and, with it, the country's most acute destination-scale environmental pressures: coastal solid waste accumulation, agricultural land conversion, traffic congestion and an unquantified exceedance of environmental carrying capacity. Indonesia has responded with Regulation of the Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy No. 9 of 2021 on Guidelines for Sustainable Tourism Destinations, which binds destination governance, economic, socio-cultural and environmental sustainability into a single mandatory instrument. Environmental outcomes in Badung, however, continue to deteriorate, indicating that the binding constraint lies in policy delivery rather than in regulatory design. This study assessed how the regulation is implemented in Badung and quantified the relative importance of the determinants that govern its delivery. A descriptive qualitative design combining in-depth interviews with nine purposively selected key informants, non-participant field observation at Kuta and Seminyak beaches, and documentary analysis was integrated with the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Four implementation determinants drawn from the Edwards III framework were decomposed into thirteen sub-criteria, compared pairwise on the Saaty nine-point scale, aggregated by geometric mean, and tested for consistency. Implementation was found to be strongest in the socio-cultural and economic pillars, where customary village institutions supply legitimacy and enforcement capacity, and weakest in the environmental and governance pillars, where inter-agency fragmentation, weak regulatory enforcement and the absence of a completed carrying-capacity study persist. The Analytic Hierarchy Process ranked communication highest (0.399), followed by resources (0.266), bureaucratic structure (0.204) and disposition (0.131); all consistency ratios remained below 0.10. Clarity of policy content and consistency of policy messaging jointly dominated the global ranking (0.155 each), whereas budget availability (0.026) and positive attitude toward policy (0.024) ranked lowest. Environmental underperformance in high-pressure destinations is therefore a delivery problem of message quality, technical competence and role clarity, not one of fiscal scarcity.