Partnerships for tourism and recreation in protected areas: Interdisciplinary perspectives on governance, management, and biodiversity financing

Abstract

Protected Areas (PAs) receive billions of visitors every year, principally for nature-based tourism (Balmford et al., 2015). However, the increasing numbers of visitors, the multifaceted objectives, and variety of stakeholders, have made the management of PA tourism progressively more difficult. PA agencies are increasingly involving stakeholders such as local people, the private sector, and non-governmental organisations, in managing recreation and tourism. This research investigates governance arrangements for tourism in PAs and explores collaborative partnerships between tourism stakeholders. The research aim is to investigate PA tourism partnerships to improve the understandings, performance, and outcomes of protected area tourism. The research aims to find out how the governance and management of protected area tourism can be improved. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the research will integrate perspectives related to PA tourism management, governance, collaborative governance, and project evaluation. The expected outcome of this research is to develop criteria, a methodology, and performance indicators for evaluating PA tourism partnerships to improve governance, management, and evaluation processes. Tourism partnerships will be investigated through the lens of the Theory of Change, a methodological approach for investigating and evaluating social problems and providing applicable solutions. The study will follow the philosophy of pragmatism as its research paradigm. It will employ a qualitative research approach and a case study research design. Qualitative data will be obtained from semi-structured interviews that will be analysed by employing a thematic technique using NVivo software. In this presentation, I aim to present the research goal, questions, gap in knowledge and the methodology that will be used in this study. I will talk about protected areas tourism, it’s positive and negative impacts, and the collaborative multi-stakeholder’s governance and partnership models for managing tourism in PAs.