Residents’ Attitudes Toward Place Marketing and Pro-environmental Behaviors at UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years, discussion on residents’ place attachment connection with World Heritage Sites (WHSs) has started to increase in tourism research. Besides tourists’ recognition and attraction of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, local people are important stakeholders that generate self-attachment to the place of living, thereby greater tendency to engage in pro-environmental behavior. In this vein, understanding place attachment is essential in planning for sustainable tourism development to conserve the physical environments as well as the meanings of places with cultural significance. However, a small number of studies have been discussing the important phenomenon of local residents’ place attachment in relation to pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors in cultural heritage tourism contexts. Therefore, this study discusses residents’ place attachment and pro-environmental behaviors toward specific UNESCO WHSs in Portugal. It develops and proposes a conceptual framework that integrates residents’ place attachment to WHS and their general and site-specific sustainable heritage behavior and presents their interrelationships in the form of hypotheses. Final considerations and future research paths are discussed.KeywordsResidents’ place attachmentPro-environmental behaviorsUNESCO World Heritage Sites