Attitudes and Perceptions of the Local Community towards Sustainable Tourism Development in Kurdistan Regional Government, Iraq

Rezhen Harun,Gabriela Chiciudean,Kawan Sirwan,Felix Arion,Iulia Muresan

doi:10.3390/su10092991

Abstract

Over the last years, tourism has undergone significant development worldwide, especially in developing countries. Tourism is a multi-faced activity with positive and negative impacts on the destinations, linking the economic, social, and environmental components of sustainable development. The attitude of the host community is an important factor for future tourism planning, management, and development of a tourism destination. As such, the paper analyzes the attitudes and perceptions of the local residents from the Kurdistan Regional Government, located in the northern part of the Republic of Iraq. To achieve the purpose of the research, a survey based on a questionnaire was conducted in Sulaimani and Halabja Governorates. A number of 320 questionnaires were applied in 2016. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and principal component analysis. The results indicate that tourism is seen as a development sector during the last years. Its positive impacts are better perceived than the negative ones, mainly because it offers more recreational opportunities due to the development of new recreational parks. Tourism increases pollution, this being the most negative aspect mentioned by the respondents, but regardless, they are proud of the progress overthe last years and they support future actions for tourism development.

Highlights

There is no doubt that over the last years, the tourism industry underwent significant development worldwide with important consequences at top levels of decision-making due to the importance of the attitudes and perceptions of the local communities for sustainable tourism planning strategies
Principal factor analysis (PCA) was conducted to assess the dimensionality of the 19 items used to evaluate the perception of rural residents towards tourism development
The heritage has been better kept in rural areas, and better preserved against external influences, where tourists have the possibility to experience the feeling of travelling back in time

Summary

Introduction

There is no doubt that over the last years, the tourism industry underwent significant development worldwide with important consequences at top levels of decision-making due to the importance of the attitudes and perceptions of the local communities for sustainable tourism planning strategies. Understanding the impact of tourism on the local communities is becoming a major topic for researchers, while being the key element in building sustainable and long-term tourism strategies [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Consulting and involving the local community whenever tourism strategies are built, increases their success rate and assures positive effects in important areas: economic, social, cultural, and environmental [7]. The local community has become one of the most important stakeholders of the tourism industry [13,14,15,16,17]. It was pointed out well that tourism is a “double-edged sword” because it involves both positive and negative aspects for the host communities [19]

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Conclusion