Rural Sustainability Challenges, Responses, and Tourism: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Rural areas worldwide face persistent and interconnected challenges that threaten long-term sustainability. Although rural development is a strategic priority across countries at different stages of development, existing responses remain fragmented and uneven in effectiveness. This study conducts a systematic literature review to identify principal rural challenges and critically examine proposed measures, with particular attention to sustainability-oriented tourism. The review analyzes 192 articles indexed in ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Google Scholar to map core challenges, and examines 223 key studies published over the past seven years to assess solutions. Thematic analysis identifies seven major challenge categories: economic, demographic, developmental, cultural, agricultural, cognitive, and ecological. Twelve types of interventions are identified in response. Tourism-related interventions—characterized by innovative themes, technologies, objectives, and conceptual frameworks—emerge as the most frequently proposed and wide-ranging, offering potential to address multiple challenges simultaneously. However, significant limitations persist. Both tourism-based and non-tourism-based measures often lack systematic integration, localized adaptation, and effective cross-sectoral coordination. Moreover, weak linkages between indigenous knowledge systems, cultural practices, and development strategies grounded in ethnoscience constrain their capacity to support sustainable rural transformation. This study argues that advancing rural sustainability requires a systemic tourism model grounded in local ethnoscientific knowledge and embedded within an integrated sustainability framework. By clarifying dominant challenges–solution patterns and identifying critical conceptual and practical gaps, the findings contribute to rural sustainability research and inform more resilient, context-sensitive rural development pathways worldwide in practice.