Values-driven Sustainability in Halal Tourism: A Critical Review of Ethical Foundations, Empirical Evidence and Governance Challenges

Abstract

Halal tourism has moved within three decades from a marginal descriptive category to one of the most rapidly expanding and heavily promoted segments of the international travel economy. Its growth has been accompanied by an increasingly confident claim: that because halal tourism is grounded in a religious ethical system, it is intrinsically more sustainable than the conventional mass tourism it seeks to supplement or displace. This critical narrative review interrogates that claim. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship published between 1989 and 2026, it examines the conceptual architecture of halal tourism, the Islamic ethical constructs most frequently invoked in support of its sustainability credentials, and the empirical record concerning environmental, social, economic and governance outcomes. The review finds a persistent and consequential gap between normative aspiration and documented practice. Islamic ethical resources relevant to sustainability are substantial and coherent, and the objectives of Islamic law offer a defensible evaluative framework that in several respects anticipates contemporary sustainability thinking. Yet the operational reality of halal tourism has been shaped predominantly by market segmentation logics, in which certification functions as a device for reassurance and differentiation rather than as an instrument of ecological or distributive accountability. Environmental performance is largely unmeasured; social outcomes for host communities are asserted more often than demonstrated; certification regimes remain fragmented, costly and weakly connected to environmental criteria; and the evidence base is dominated by cross-sectional attitudinal studies concentrated in a small number of destinations. The review argues that a values-driven sustainability agenda for halal tourism requires the translation of ethical principle into measurable indicators, the integration of environmental accounting into halal assurance systems, and governance reform that redistributes decision-making authority toward host communities. Four summary tables consolidate the conceptual, empirical and governance findings.