From Regional Capacity to Green Tourism Practice: Economic, Social, and Environmental Drivers across Indonesian Provinces

This study examines how regional economic, fiscal, digital, human-capital, environmental, and tourism-pressure factors shape green-tourism practices across Indonesian provinces. It uses a harmonized panel of 34 historical provinces for 2018–2023 and constructs a Green Tourism Index (GTI) from three observed practices at commercial tourist attractions: environmentally friendly systems, reduce-reuse-recycle activities, and internal waste-treatment installations. Two-way fixed-effects models with province and year effects and province-clustered standard errors are estimated on 202 complete province-year observations. The results show that real GRDP per capita is the strongest determinant of GTI (? = 35.223, p = 0.004), while fiscal priority for tourism is positive but marginally significant (? = 1.319, p = 0.061). Digital capacity, tourism human capital, and general environmental quality are not independently significant for the composite GTI. Tourism pressure and its squared term are jointly insignificant, and the implied turning point lies outside the observed data range. Component models show that economic capacity is positively associated with environmentally friendly systems and internal waste-treatment installations, while fiscal priority is most clearly related to environmentally friendly systems. The findings suggest that green-tourism implementation is primarily a regional capacity-to-practice process, supported by targeted public tourism expenditure.