Environmental protection and local resident attitudes at early stages of tourism development

Abstract

In many developing countries, there are protected areas with very strong natural resources and tourism development potential but in a poor conservation condition. Many of these areas are at pre or early stages of tourism development. These protected areas face problems including shortages of financial resources and park staff, and difficulty in enforcing conservation laws. Strict conservation laws have limited local residents’ access to the natural resources and created problems such as increased poaching, habitat destruction and local people-park conflicts. This study adopts a case study approach, choosing two villages in rural Iran that are located near protected areas, one with no tourism and one at the early stage of tourism. Both these villages are experiencing challenges in striving for environmental protection and community development in a remote area of the country. There is a growing body of literature that recognises the importance of local resident attitudes and local people-park relationship roles in achieving both conservation goals and sustainable tourism development in and around protected areas. It is also suggested that incentives from tourism have a pivotal role in positively affecting local resident attitudes to the environment and consequently their behaviour. However, a challenge in the tourism literature is that most of the studies on local resident attitudes to the environment were conducted at a certain stage of development and their results cannot be applied to other stages. Although the literature indicates that tourism revenues improve local resident attitudes towards the environment and conservation, with no study comparing attitudes before and after tourism development, it is unclear whether these positive attitudes are due to tourism benefits or whether the local resident attitudes were positive even before tourism development. It is also widely discussed and hypothesised in the tourism literature that people with positive environmental attitudes are more likely to support environmental conservation activities. Local resident attitudes towards conservation have generally been studied as a single variable in the tourism literature. Importantly the environmental literature suggests that local resident attitudes towards environmental conservation and their attitudes towards protected area management might be different and a distinction has been made in studying these attitudes as separate variables. Consequently, this study aims to investigate the differences between local resident attitudes towards the environment, protected area management (PAM) and tourism at two early stages of tourism development by comparing attitudes in a community that has no prior experience of tourism and a community at an early stage of tourism development. This involved developing six ii hypotheses to assess the association between the three variables within and across a non-tourism setting and a setting with some tourism development in the two case study villages. A survey instrument was designed to measure local residents’ socio-demographic information, attitudes towards the environment, attitudes towards protected area management, and attitudes towards tourism. Information on the cases study villages was also gathered via interviews, observations and secondary data. Analyses of the survey data revealed that, in contrast to the literature, there were no significant differences in attitudes toward the environment between the two settings. Importantly, there were statistically significant differences between attitudes towards protected area management in the two settings. Based on the survey and the other qualitative data collected, it seems that tourism was successful in providing alternative sources of income for local residents and in reducing their dependence on natural resources and resulted in fewer local people-park conflicts and more positive attitudes towards protected area management. However, observation in the village with tourism showed that these positive environmental attitudes did not translate into environmental behaviour, as local residents were engaged in unsustainable environmental activities in the village. For the case study villages, tourism does appear to offer potential to improve both environmental protection and community development, but tourism development needs to proceed carefully and with awareness of the potential for other environmental problems to emerge if it is not well managed. This study has contributed to the tourism body of knowledge as the first study to focus on local resident attitudes at the pre-development stage and compare it with attitudes at the early stages of tourism development. It further made a distinction between attitudes towards the environment and attitudes towards protected area management which had not been previously addressed in tourism studies. Practical suggestions have been made for protected area mangers and tourism planners. Knowing local resident attitudes at the early stages of tourism development should assist in reducing local people-park conflicts, improving environmental conservation, and reducing negative tourism environmental impacts. To ensure tourism contributes to both environmental conservation and community development, there is a need for different management strategies such as education programs, zoning, and law enforcement in and around protected areas. To achieve these goals, all key stakeholders such as government bodies and local communities must be included in protected area planning and tourism development.