An aspect often overlooked in sustainable tourism development literature is that much of it has originated from developed countries and hence does not take into account the socio-economic, political and legislative conditions of the developing world. The purpose of this study is to provide a phased model for sustainable tourism planning and development in developing countries by incorporating two major factors: an ‘integrated stakeholder’ approach and the inclusion of appropriate sustainability indicators of the human, socio-cultural, economic and environmental categories of capital stock.The model would be developed based upon an examination of rural tourism initiatives in India, and would seek to be representative of developing countries in general, by accounting for their unique development challenges. Its application could then be customized by destination tourism planners to their own contextual specificities and would provide an effective framework for community based sustainable tourism development
