Sustainable solid waste management in coastal and marine tourism cities in Vietnam: A hierarchical-level approach

This study contributes to assess the sustainable solid-waste management of coastal and marine cities in Vietnam due to prior studies are lacking to develop a set of measures in hierarchical structure. Coastal and marine tourism cities are the largest and fastest growing segment of the tourism industry. City infrastructures are being developed in the absence of a solid-waste management capacity and create a gap in the measurement of sustainable solid-waste management. This study employs both qualitative techniques and quantitative measures to extend the literature. An exploratory factor analysis is applied to test the proposed hierarchical framework’s validity and reliability. A fuzzy synthetic evaluation and a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory are used to evaluate sustainable solid-waste management in the cities. A set of criteria that consider the economic benefit, environment assessment and social impact are constructed on six aspects: funding and expenditures, tourism activities, the policy and legal framework, environmental co-creation, stakeholder participation and community awareness. The result reveals the causal interrelationships among the aspects and that stakeholder participation, tourism activities, and the policy and legal framework are the causal attributes for achieving sustainability performance. Civil construction debris, the tourist flow, the support of political leadership, cost-sharing and mutual strategy adoption, and technical cooperation are also found to be success criteria that contribute as practical guidelines for practitioners and communities. More emphasis needs to be placed on coastal and marine environments, and doing so has the highest priority value and contributes to raising awareness of issues in the development process.