DescriptionCosta Rica has long been considered a world leader in sustainable tourism and ecotourism. With global tourism expected to increase rapidly in the coming years, domestic policy is needed to mitigate and regulate the enormous ramifications tourism and travel can have on the nature environment and local communities. This paper seeks to evaluate Costa Rica's sustainable tourism policies and relevant environmental governance systems, questioning the ecological and socio- economic effectiveness of the country's overall sustainable tourism policy using an eco-holistic analysis. An eco-holistic analysis enables a perspective of the current governance systems and policy that goes beyond traditional regime analysis, which typically only focuses on behavioral change. The eco-holistic approach takes into account four elements of evaluation that need to be understood in order to determine effective environmental and sustainable tourism policy. The four elements are, economic structure, time and temporal frameworks, scientific knowledge, and regulatory structure. Using these four elements, this paper exposes the faults in Costa Rica's system and suggests ways in which policy can be reformed that may also be relevant transnationally. The aim of this paper is to expand the awareness of tourism's impact on the natural environment and local communities and display the four key elements that policy-makers must consider while forming effective environmental and sustainable policy. Using Costa Rica as a case study demonstrates that, even in a country considered one of the world’s leaders in sustainable and ecotourism, the policy and programs put in place are inadequate.