Prioritizing Circular Economy Pathways for Sustainable Community Based Tourism in Vietnam’s Northern Highlands

Integrating circular economy (CE) principles into community-based tourism (CBT) is a strategic pathway toward achieving sustainable development, yet empirical assessment frameworks to quantify this application remain limited. This study addresses this gap by developing and validating a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model to evaluate CE applications in CBT within the Northern Mountainous Region of Vietnam. A combined Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy AHP) and VIKOR methodology was implemented to handle the complexity and uncertainty inherent in sustainability judgments. A two-stage data collection was employed, gathering judgments from a panel of 31 multi-sectoral experts for criterion weighting and survey data from 60 tourists for performance evaluation across four provinces: Lao Cai, Tuyen Quang, Son La, and Thai Nguyen. The Fuzzy AHP analysis identified “Local Resource Optimization and Waste Minimization” as the most critical criterion (weight: 0.385). The subsequent VIKOR analysis ranked the strategy of “Integrated Linkages to Create Circular Products with Strong Local Cultural Identity” as the optimal compromise solution. This research offers a robust analytical framework for similar contexts and provides evidence-based policy recommendations, emphasizing that enhancing resource efficiency through the valorization of indigenous culture is a critical pathway toward resilient tourism models.