Study on Ecological Value Co-Creation of Tourism Enterprises in Protected Areas: Scale Development and Test

Abstract

The ecological value co-creation of protected areas needs to be constructed in a multi-dimensional way. By referring to relevant foreign and domestic literature reviews, it is found that value co-creation theory has not been applied in eco-tourism research yet. The ecological value of protected areas is a combination of environmental value, social value and economic value. Stakeholders in protected areas including the government, stewardship agency, local community, tourism enterprises, tourists and so on interact with each other with different interests and have an impact on the ecosystem, eventually influencing the whole ecological value of protected areas. Among them, tourism enterprises play an important role and function as a double-edged sword. On one hand, they bring human resource, logistics, capital flow, information flow and energy into the ecosystem to create social and economic benefits. On the other hand, they pursue maximum profits which may cause the irreversible destruction of natural resources. The fact that all the stakeholders rely largely on natural resources and the other stakeholders makes ecological value co-creation become the possible best solution for the sustainable development of protected areas. The key is to study the characteristics and patterns of value co-creation behaviors of those tourism enterprises; thus, its scale development is of great importance. On the basis of the literature review and in-depth interviews with stewardship agencies and tourism enterprises in protected areas, this study develops a scale of ecological value co-creation behaviors from the perspective of small tourism enterprises. Then, with an investigation of tourism enterprises in protected areas, it validates ecological value co-creation behaviors by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The results show that tourism enterprise ecological value co-creation behavior is a construct consisting of four dimensions: environmental citizenship behavior, dialogue and communication behavior, knowledge-sharing behavior and co-petition behavior, which could be measured by 12 items. The reliability and validity test presents good internal consistency, reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the scale. In the end, the relationship of interdependency between tourism enterprises and other stakeholders in the protected area with ecological value co-creation behaviors is examined, which shows good predictive validity of the scale. Given these results above, this scale can not only be used as a measuring tool in future research but can also be provided as a reference to authorities to manage the tourism enterprises in protected areas. Finally, the study discusses the limitations and future research directions.