45 Copyright ©2025, IGI Global Scientific Publishing. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global Scientific Publishing is prohibited. DOI: 10.4018/979-8-3693-8633-0.ch003 Chapter 3 Association of Tourism Sector With Sustainable Development and Its Drivers Ajay Kumar Singh https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0429-0925 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India S. Srinivasan https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0179-9849 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India ABSTRACT Tourism industry creates multiple opportunities to increase social-economic, financial and human de- velopment. It is worthy of increasing sustainable development and its other drivers. However, existing researchers did not measure the impact of the tourism sector on sustainable development and its other dimensions. Excessive tourism development may also create obstacles and challenges for achieving sustainability in economic, social, financial, environmental, technological and cultural development, and the tourism sector. This chapter explores the association of the tourism sector with sustainable development across countries using the robust empirical models. It shows the contribution of open innovation in tourism sector and sustainable development is also highlighted in this chapter. It infers that economic and social sustainability improve as tourism development increases. Tourism sector also showed a significant impact on environmental sustainability and sustainable development. INTRODUCTION Tourism sector includes all activities that help to increase the attention of people for traveling within a county and other countries for various purposes. Appropriate tourism ecosystem is significant to increase the perception of tourists to travel in a specific country. Tourism development is a process for forming a business to attract people to travel in specific areas (Baloch et al., 2023). It also compares all social, economic, technological, logistical, infrastructure and transportation activities that promote the traveling of people from one geographical location or region to another (Mattichi et al., 2024). It also involves