Women’s multifunctional roles and empowerment in the transition from fishing to coastal tourism in Vietnam
Thi Bich Duyen Pham & Vien Tran Truc Pham
What the paper says
Women are central to tourism worldwide, yet their labour, particularly in coastal and island settings, remains undervalued and largely invisible. This study investigates women’s participation in emerging sea–island tourism economies in South-Central Vietnam, where ecological vulnerability, seasonality, and persistent gender norms intersect with shifting livelihoods. Drawing on field observations across six coastal communities and 25 semistructured interviews, the study examines women’s multifunctional work spanning formal, informal, and household-based sectors, as well as the opportunities, constraints, and enabling conditions that shape their agency. The findings show that women sustain coastal tourism through homestay hospitality, seafood vending, service work, and cultural labour, generating income, supporting household welfare, and strengthening community resilience. Yet their empowerment is limited by patriarchal expectations, restricted access to finance and training, language barriers, and heightened exposure to environmental shocks linked to coastal change. To explain these dynamics, the study develops the Sea–Island Tourism Empowerment (SITE) framework, which integrates Scheyvens’s empowerment domains, Longwe’s progression model, and Moser’s gender-planning concepts with contemporary blue-economy perspectives. The framework conceptualises empowerment as relational and collective, embedded in ecologically fragile marine systems rather than solely within individual advancement. In doing so, the study contributes to broader debates on blue-economy governance and gendered coastal livelihoods by revealing how women’s often invisible labour underpins the sustainability of marine tourism. Practical implications include expanding financial inclusion, strengthening skills training, recognising household-based contributions, and increasing women’s representation in local tourism governance and marine protected area committees
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.