Managing protected areas for sustainable tourism: prospects for adaptive co-management

Abstract

This paper looks at the challenging enterprise of managing protected areas for sustainable tourism. It notes that during the past 25 years multistakeholder conflicts, complexity and uncertainty have emerged and persisted as important issues requiring managerial responses. These issues reflect substantial paradigmatic shifts in pursuing and understanding sustainability. Governance directs attention to broad participatory approaches, and complex systems theory emphasises transformative changes and an integrative perspective that couples human and natural systems (a social–ecological system). The paper envisions the prospects of adaptive co-management as an alternative approach to protected areas management for sustainable tourism. It also makes the case for an interdisciplinary approach by highlighting important and informative developments outside tourism studies. Adaptive co-management bridges governance and complex systems by bringing together cooperative and adaptive approaches to management. In appraising the potential for adaptive co-management attention is systematically directed to conceptual, technical, ethical and practical dimensions. While adaptive co-management is clearly not a universal answer, experiences and knowledge from natural resource management raise salient prospects for the approach to be insightfully applied to protected areas for sustainable tourism.