Models. Sustainability. Accessibility. Coastal Tourist Destinations.
A tourist destination should not be considered sustainable if it is not accessible, as these are convergent themes because they address common issues, such as social participation, citizenship, human rights, among others. Based on this assumption and in view of the existence of a gap identified in the literature, the main objective of the thesis was to develop an instrument to assessing the level of sustainable development of tourism in coastal destinations, which would consider accessibility commitments, in order to contribute to categorize these destinations and generate subsidies for public policies with this approach. Guided by multiparadigm theoretical-philosophical conceptions, the methodological framework of the thesis involved distinct phases with different bibliographical, documentary and field research. The relevance of this proposal is due to the possibility and need to update and advance existing evaluation models for sustainable tourism development, which should be guided by an increasingly social and inclusive bias. The direct contributions of this thesis include the theoretical proposition of the term "accessible sustainability" and its empirical unfolding that are operationalized by the Assessment Model of Accessible Sustainability for Coastal Destinations (MASA) whose results culminate in the Accessible Sustainability Index (ISA) that can indicate how close they are to being effectively making a destination that develops sustainable tourism. In order to validate the MASA, the indicators that compose it, were applied in Natal/RN, a coastal destination of national relevance. This empirical verification allowed preliminary attest the feasibility of this instrument, since it provided results embodied in what is proposed by the MASA. It requires, however, wide application in other coastal destinations, in addition to continued monitoring for possible adjustments, since evaluation models should be tools susceptible to constant social adequacies.