This thesis examines how Destination Management Systems (DMS) can function as governance mechanisms for integrating tourism development with broader regional planning and sustainable development objectives. While tourism is often promoted as a driver of local economic growth, its governance is frequently fragmented across sectoral boundaries, with tourism development, land-use planning, heritage conservation, and environmental management addressed through parallel and weakly coordinated institutional systems. Existing destination development models, including life-cycle and market-oriented approaches, offer limited analytical leverage for understanding these governance challenges, particularly in developing-country contexts. To address this gap, the thesis conceptualizes DMS not as a standalone digital platform or a single destination management organization (DMO), but as an integrated socio-technical and institutional arrangement through which tourism is coordinated, regulated, and strategically steered at the destination level. Drawing on regional planning theory and integrated sustainable development frameworks, the study proposes a multi-layer analytical framework consisting of a System Layer, a Functional Layer, and a Meta Governance Layer. This framework emphasizes governance capacity, institutional maturity, and cross-sectoral coordination as key determinants of destination outcomes. Empirically, the thesis applies this framework to the case of Uzbekistan, a country experiencing rapid tourism growth under conditions of limited institutional capacity and evolving governance structures. Using qualitative analysis of policy documents, institutional arrangements, and secondary data, the study examines how existing destination management practices are shaped by fragmented governance and uneven coordination across policy domains. The analysis highlights how tourism initiatives are constrained not by destination attributes alone, but by the maturity of governance systems and their ability to integrate data, planning, and stakeholder participation. The thesis contributes to tourism and regional planning scholarship by offering a governance-oriented reconceptualization of DMS and by advancing an institutional maturity perspective that moves beyond linear destination development models. For policy and practice, the findings suggest that strengthening destination governance requires attention not only to tourism-specific interventions, but also to the broader public systems that enable coordination, learning, and long-term strategic planning.