10th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference in conjunction with the Australian Social Network Analysis Conference (ASNAC)

This study develops a practice-based and institutionally embedded understanding of sustainability in peer-to-peer accommodation (P2PA) through a systematic literature review of host sustainability practices. Drawing on Social Practice Theory and an institutional perspective, the review examines how sustainability practices are configured, enacted, and reproduced within everyday hosting contexts.

Sustainability has become an increasingly important concern in P2PA research, particularly in relation to environmental impacts, community relations, and responsible consumption. P2PA provides a particularly informative empirical setting because sustainability is enacted through the continual integration of environmental, social, cultural, and economic practices within everyday host–guest, community, and place-based interactions. However, existing research has often focused on structural conditions, consumer attitudes, and sustainability outcomes, with comparatively less attention to how sustainability is enacted through hosts’ everyday practices.

Hosts play a central role in translating sustainability into everyday accommodation practices through their daily decisions and interactions. Understanding how hosts interpret, adapt, and enact sustainability is therefore essential for explaining how sustainability is realised in P2PA. This presents not only a substantive research gap but also a methodological challenge for evidence synthesis: how can evidence of sustainability practice be identified across studies that conceptualise and examine sustainability in different ways?

This study addresses this challenge through a qualitative systematic literature review of host-level sustainability practices in P2PA. Guided by an interpretivist perspective, the review combines a PRISMA-informed search and screening process with qualitative thematic synthesis. Searches of Web of Science and Scopus identified 762 records published between 2008 and December 2025. After deduplication, 492 records were screened, 72 underwent full-text assessment, and 69 studies were included in the final synthesis.

A central methodological feature is a practice-first screening and coding strategy. Rather than treating all studies framed as sustainability research as equivalent sources of practice evidence, the review distinguishes between empirical evidence of enacted host practices and studies focused primarily on guest attitudes, sustainability intentions, platform policies, or destination-level outcomes. Studies providing direct evidence of what hosts do, implement, or manage are treated as core evidence. Studies offering host-actionable recommendations without directly examining host practices are considered supplementary contextual evidence. This distinction strengthens analytical clarity by preventing recommendations and intentions from being conflated with observed practices.

The synthesis combines Social Practice Theory with an institutional perspective. NVivo-assisted thematic analysis examines how sustainability practices are configured through meanings, competences, and materials, while also considering institutional influences such as platform governance, market pressures, community infrastructure, and regulatory arrangements. This approach connects everyday hosting activities with the wider conditions that enable, constrain, and reshape them.

The findings identify selective enactment as a key process: sustainability practices are rarely simply adopted or rejected, but are modified, combined, maintained, or abandoned in response to hosts’ values, capabilities, resources, guest expectations, and wider institutional conditions. The analysis also reveals creative value integration, whereby practices such as local sourcing, cultural storytelling, waste reduction, and community collaboration can simultaneously support sustainability, guest experience, business differentiation, and community benefits.

The presentation concludes by considering the wider methodological implications of practice-oriented qualitative synthesis. It demonstrates how clearly defining the actor and unit of analysis, distinguishing enacted practices from attitudes and prescriptions, and integrating micro-level practices with institutional contexts can generate more meaningful explanations from heterogeneous research. More broadly, the study highlights the importance of explicit conceptual boundaries and transparent screening decisions when synthesising heterogeneous interdisciplinary literatures, particularly where broad social science concepts are conceptualised and operationalised in different ways across studies.