Draft Principles for Tourism in Protected Areas

Abstract

Ecotourism businesses need accessible natural environments, and many of them are in national parks or other protected areas. But the parks were set up for conservation and public recreation, not tourism. So how should they deal with commercial tour operators? Market to them, keep them out, ignore them, licence them, change them, compete with them, restrict them, form partnerships with them? Or perhaps all of the above, in different times and places and circumstances? In practice the politics are complex, and different in every country, but the same issues arise repeatedly. So, do we need to start from scratch every time, or are there some basic principles which might apply generally? As an analogy, in the real estate rental business we don’t negotiate every lease from scratch – there are standard leases, and negotiations focus on period, rent and special conditions. Could we use a similar approach for tourism in parks? At the Australian Academy of Science Fenner Conference on Nature Tourism and the Environment in September 2001, I tried to formulate such principles as a starting point, so that we could proceed directly to technical discussion on ways and means. With tour operators, tourism agencies, park managers and academics all present, I tried to stick to the simplest, most unequivocal statements. ‘Commercial tour operators are legally different from members of the general public’, for example. That’s just a fact, right? But even these provoked controversy. So in the three months after the conference we compiled comments from all concerned, and reworked the first draft into the version below, where principles are separated from preamble. In Australia at present, this version is being debated within tourism associations and protected area management agencies, under the aegis of the Ecotourism Association of Australia’s Tourism and Protected Areas Forum. But the draft Principles apply worldwide, and where better to debate them than the Journal of Ecotourism? So we welcome your comments, and shall be glad to consider them for publication either in their entirety, in precis, or as part of a modified set of Principles.