Purpose – Governance is a polysemous concept that has been gaining the attention of social scientists and humanists over the last three decades. Tourism governance studies have mirrored the knowledge developed within traditional disciplines to analyse processes in different spheres of action. This paper aims to perceive how tourism governance has been applied in scientific research over recent decades, in terms of its conceptualization, territorial scale and the type of territory studied. Design – Using a literature review, we present an analysis of governance in tourism studies and we show the potential of textual statistics for the analysis of huge amounts of textual data. Methodology – Data were extracted from SCOPUS, from 1999 to 2020, based on the keywords ‘governance’ and ‘tourism’. All abstracts were encoded and analysed using ALCESTE software. Findings – The findings reveal a great concern with sustainability, especially with the environmental and social impacts generated by tourism, and destination management, with an emphasis on the performance of the public sector through local and regional institutions and their relations with local tourism stakeholders. Originality of the research – The novelty of this work is the analysis of the conceptual framework and implementation practises in governance and tourism using an innovative software tool for textual analysis.