Empowerment has become a key theme in sustainable tourism, significantly strengthening the inclusion of women and marginalized groups in the tourism sector. Despite its increasing significance, there has been a limited systematic review of how empowerment studies in tourism have evolved, their intellectual foundations, and areas requiring further investigation. To address this gap, a comprehensive literature search was conducted in the Scopus database using the keywords “tourism” and “empowerment,” applied to titles, abstracts, keywords, and authors. As of December 31, 2023, the search yielded 1,406 publications. After filtering for English-language journal publications specifically addressing tourism and empowerment, 979 publications published between 1993 and 2023 were retained for bibliometric analysis. The results reveal substantial growth in scholarship over the past three decades. The selected publications involved 158 authors across 122 journals and represented research from 99 countries. Indonesia emerged as the most productive country, while the United Kingdom was the most influential in terms of impact. Among 159 contributing institutions, the University of Johannesburg was the most productive, and the University of Georgia demonstrated the strongest influence. Collaboration networks showed active participation among ninety-six countries, including Taiwan, France, Indonesia, Spain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, China, and the United States. A co-word analysis identified dominant themes such as empowerment, sustainable tourism, community-based tourism, resilience, and entrepreneurship, while co-citation analysis clarified the field’s intellectual structure. Although reliance on Scopus provided valuable insights, limitations include potential language and regional biases. Future studies should integrate multiple databases to enhance comprehensiveness and reduce coverage gaps.
Yaw Boakye Agyeman (Tue,) studied this question.