Although Sustainable Tourism (ST) represents a positive approach for community development, its implementation is challenging. Institutional strategies may work well in one location but not in another, making it necessary to develop context-based ST management theory to provide some guidance for tourism development. Such theory can only be built with the accumulation of knowledge from cases where a combination of institutional arrangements and context-specific characteristics showed to be - or not – sustainable. We show, however, how ST research is fragmented, challenging the comparison of results. We adapt and propose The Coupled Infrastructure System Framework (CISF) as a tool for tourism research to integrate efforts. With its guidance, we perform a qualitative meta-analysis. Ninety case studies were systematically coded and analyzed to identify linkages between context characterist...