What is Overtourism and What Can We Do About It?

Part II

Recognizing and agreeing that there is a problem is the first step to its resolution, understanding and framing the problem and its context comes along later, and still much later do we get to identifying resolutions (not solutions, as I will mention later) that we can propose and implement. I mentioned yesterday some dimensions of the challenge of tourism and visitor management in protected areas. So lets take a look.

The first dimension we need to understand is that that we live in a world of complexity, change and uncertainty, a world of turbulence, and a world of conflict. This context means we can no longer assume predictability and we must assume surprises happen, and that we must manage adaptively. This context means that we need planning processes, which are the processes to resolve problems, that are based on sound critical thinking and principles, and must be learning and consensus building focused. Since the world is everchanging, problems do not stay solved because their context is always changing; so the best we can do is to find responses to those problems that we can build a consensus around. These problems are also wicked and messy, technical terms proposed by systems thinkers such as Russell Ackoff, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. Wicked and messy problems are those for which no correct answer exists, which are connected to other problems and for which we need new approaches to planning.

Tourism and visitor management are not exceptions to the above context. Tourism is connected to many other social and environmental challenges and opportunities, such as economic opportunity and poverty alleviation; its revenues can be used to sustain traditional cultural events or practices, fund protected area management, or support access to health and education. At the same time, the social and environmental consequences of tourism, like every other area of human activity, can be negative, such as pollution, biophysical impact, conflict with locals over behavior norms or competition for favorite locations and so on. The negative social consequences of tourism are particularly intricate and thorny and require lots of attention for their resolution. This does not say tourism is bad per se, but that we recognize that tourism has both positives and negatives and both must be managed.

At the same time, when we look at problems of “overtourism” the first place we should look is in the mirror. We, speaking generally about academics, non-governmental organizations and management, are often the cause of problems we face because of programs and resolutions implemented in the past and in the theories we espouse. When we promote a park, without a corresponding management program in place, overtourism results (please note: our understanding of marketing among the protected area community is limited, promotion is only one part of marketing, which is making connections between people and places for experiences to occur).

(And by the way, if you are interested, these ideas are discussed in a new book authored by my colleague Jon Kohl and myself, The Future has Other Plans, published by Fulcrum Publishing.)

Do we ask: Are the management systems in place to take facilitate quality visitor experiences? Are we prepared for surprises? What is our vision of tourism and visitor use? What is our mission in implementing this vision? What are the fundamental princples upon which our tourism and visitor management program based? What have we done in the past that has lead to problems, and what have we learned from that?

Finally, and this statement may be controversial to many, conservation has beed framed as principally a biological problem when it is actually a political one. As a result, visitor and tourism management have not been at the forefront of planning and management, (neither has working with communities dependent upon resources within protected areas, building consensus around practical, implementable actions, working with constituencies to create a sense of ownership in the protected area and plan, or building trust). This conventional framing of conservation is not bad, but in the 21^st century, it is not necessarily effective.

Our mental models of conservation and management of tourism and visitor use need to change to something more appropriate and useful. Wicked problems and messy situations will continue, surprises will happen, relationships between people and nature will change, in mostly unpredictable ways.

A bit more on this next time, then we will get more specific about managing tourism and visitor use.

What is Overtourism and What Can We Do About It?

Recently, there has been growing mention in the social media about "Overtourism" and its negative consequences. 

First, I want to say that I have never heard this word before, so I am not sure what it means. So, looked it up on the internet and found a few references to it. Even this:

So, as there has been since the 1950s actually, when in the U.S., the Christian Science Monitor (a newspaper) published a series of articles about how American national were being “loved to death” there is continuing concern about the quantity of tourism, as there should be, for reasons I will describe. (I have to note that 60 years later the parks are still here, and have not died.)

So a bit of background first. I have just returned from visiting Yellowstone (one of the overtourists, I believe I am ) with my family and which has been cited as one of the places receiving such high amounts of visitation that we should be concerned. This happened during the absolutely most visited period of time (last part of July first part of August). There were probably over 30,000 visitors in the park during those days. And yes, the park was congested. At one point, we experienced a “bison jam”, cars stopped on the road because of a heard of bison, that was perhaps 2 km long. Now there were two reasons for the cars being stopped. First, there were occasionally bison blocking the road, and between a car and a bison, the bison wins. Second, people stopped their cars on the road to photograph the bison. Now this latter reason was most likely the cause of the bison jam, that is, not the number of cars, but rather the people driving the cars, in disregard of an infinite number of messages from the National Park Service to not stop the car on the road. So, the bison jam was a function of behavior more so than numbers of cars. So was there “too much tourism?”

The answer is “I don’t know”.

Some more background. I have been studying and working with protected area managers on visitor management and tourism issues for about 50 years, yes, 50 years. I started my graduate studies focusing on issues of biophysical impacts and then moved on to social science side of things, because it became clear to me that side of management was very challenging, thorny, if you will, and hardly any one paid any attention to visitors, except to complain there were too many. Even then.

I have visited Yellowstone many times since 1970, 5 times in the last year. Some trips were for business, others for holiday (I am very fortunate, I live 400 km from Yellowstone). But even on holidays, visiting Yellowstone required some thinking about what was happening.

Part of the challenge we have in addressing the question of visitation management is its complexity, part of the problem is that the problem has often been caused by solutions implemented in the past, and part of the problem is that we have ignored tourism and visitation management in our conservation programs. That may sound harsh to many of you. But the reality is that we devote few resources to designing public use plans, fewer to implementing them, and fewer still to building managerial capacity. The latter several of us wrote about in 2012 in the December issue of Parks.

For example, how many general management plans devote more than a few pages to managing tourism and visitation? How many have developed a vision of what public use should look like? How many have standards of acceptable change? How many have defined what a good visitor experience would be? How many monitor those experiences?

If we don’t ask these questions, we cannot answer the question if there is too much tourism, at least as professionals.

I will conclude now, but will write again shortly on how we can better frame the opportunity we have in managing visitation and tourism.

Steve

Building Resilience—A New Way of Thinking about Sustainable Tourism

In our recent book, Reframing Sustainable Tourism, Keith Bosak lay out the idea of resilience—the capacity of a system to adapt to disturbances—as a goal of sustainable tourism to replace the notion of a Triple Bottom Line, which has dominated technical and academic discourse over the last 30 years or so. To provide some additional perspective, we will broadcast live a Google Hangout on this topic on Thursday, 14 April at 11 AM U.S. Mountain Daylight Time. You can view the Hangout live, or view it any other time at this URL:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV_e_r-dWSw.

You can purchase the book on Amazon.com or you can go the the Springer Publisher website to purchase electronic copies of the entire book or individual chapters: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9789401772082 .

See this video taken at the World Parks Conference introducing a special issue of Koedoe dedicated to Tourism and Protected Areas:  .

The 2014 World Parks Congress: Some Lessons Learned about Tourism and Protected Areas

I recently participated in the World Parks Congress held in Sydney Australia, 12-19 November. Organized every 10-11 years (last in Durbin South Africa in 2003), the Congress is sponsored by IUCN to convene managers, scientists, community development specialists and artists in an 8 day dialogue about the role of protected areas such as national parks, wilderness, national forests and community conserved areas in preserving the world’s remaining biodiversity and natural heritage. The 6000 participants engaged in hundreds of sessions, had their choice of what must have been thousands of individual presentations, engaged in renewing friendships and strengthening their common passion.

Tourism and visitors are a vital part of the natural heritage scene—indeed many of the world’s 200,000 plus protected areas were set aside for visitors to enjoy and appreciate the earth’s natural beauty—not only in gaining a better appreciation of natural heritage, but also their role in providing for and protecting human life. In this respect, protected areas are not an optional thing that societies do, but one that is essential to ensuring the future of the human species on this little place we call earth. In participating in a number of tourism related sessions and others dealing with the theme of “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” and “Inspiring a New Generation” I learned several lessons, not all of them positive.

Lesson 1. Young people are key to conserving natural heritage.

Nelson Mandela had advised the World Parks Congress in 2003 to engage young people in conserving parks, wildlife, water and the environment. A major stream of the 2014 Parks Congress focused on this charge. Indeed, the whole idea of sustainability is to leave options for those living in the future, and youth represent the near term future—but they need guidance and the wisdom experience provides. There are many ways to engage people in conservation and protected areas, but visiting them is probably the most effective way of engaging nature, viewing it, learning from it, appreciating its importance and eventually conserving it. This means more visits to protected areas, and the challenge not only for educators but managers as well is to provide opportunities for high quality experiences. To do this, we need managerial, informational and physical infrastructure. Competent managers are needed to ensure impacts from visitation do not lead to unacceptable degradation; information is needed to interpret and communicate the wonders of our natural heritage and how our life depends on it; and physical infrastructure is needed to sensitively access protected areas.

Lesson 2. Relationships between people and parks are changing; they are dynamic and that leads to some uncertainty.

Maintaining the relevancy of protected areas to society will remain a challenge because the meanings that society’s attach to them are always in a state of change. During the 2003 World Parks Congress, there was considerable discussion about the utilitarian benefits of protected areas, the ecosystem-based services that nature provides, in the language that was used. The emphasis in the 2014 conference built upon this arguing that protected areas just didn’t provide services but our natural heritage is essential to continuing human life on this planet. Protected areas have traditionally been seen as places in which to recreate, in the U.S., national parks, for example, were often viewed as “nature’s playgrounds.” While recreation will remain an important relationship, society is changing, valuing other benefits and meanings as well, such as places where “normal” people can learn about life and living on a small planet. The changing character of these relationships is not really predictable leading to the inevitable conclusion that managing agencies need to remain adaptive, employ sensing mechanisms to identify change, and creative in seeing new ways to connect to the people they serve.

Lesson 3. Communities must have ownership in conservation and protected areas.

At my first World Parks Congress, in 1992, there was considerable conflict between the indigenous and aboriginal peoples, primarily from the south, and activists of the north. The former tended to see protected areas as a cost to them, as when they were being gazetted, their access to resources needed for livelihoods was limited. In 2003, this conflict had changed to tension, principally as indigenous people argued that (1) they had for a long time practiced conservation, and (2) need to be engaged in conventional, versus traditional, authority designations of protected areas occuring on or near their ancestral lands. In 2014, indigenous and aboriginal peoples were fully supportive of protected areas in which they had not just been consulted with, but engaged in gazetting and management. The lesson for me is that people need this sense of ownership in the protected area to fully support it and work with managing agencies. This sense of ownership, which Paul Lachapelle and I wrote about nearly a decade ago, is critical to effective management, and yet we know little about how to build it, maintain it, and use it to further conservation goals. Of course, for many indigenous people, their sense of ownership is based on legal rights of access and use. Communities is where tourism development often happens. Communities that are not happy about protected areas or have little ownership in their management will find it difficult to develop high quality visitor opportunities.

Lesson 4. Capacity to manage protected areas is limited leading to ineffective management.

The World Parks Congress in 2014 finally began addressing building the capacity to manage protected areas effectively. According to the 2014 edition of the Protected Planet report (published by the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Center) only an estimated 29% of the world’s designated protected areas are effectively managed, a figure less than what I had expected. Building managerial competency is an important dimension of effective stewardship, which I have written about in previous blogs here (particularly most recently on Sept. 27, 2014). There was a crosscutting theme on Capacity Development at the Congress in which I participated. Among the competencies I have long argued that are needed are not just technical skills, but leadership and critical thinking, the types of dimensions to management that Peter Senge often writes about. In this respect, I focus principally on middle management, because in organizations that is the critical level at which policy is translated to action, and because ranger level capacity development is already the focus of much capacity development activity. And there are few opportunities for managers to develop those skills---for example the International Seminar on Protected Area Management (see my blog of Aug. 8, 2013). We need many such seminars to build capacity—why not have such seminars on every continent every year, and multiple copies of them? And, we need tertiary and continuing education programs as well, particularly in tourism and visitation management as this is where much of the problematic 

challenges arise.

Lesson 5. There is great demand among managers for information about managing tourism and visitation, but this demand receives little recognition from NGOs.

And speaking of competencies, tourism is likely the largest commercial use of protected areas, and many managers struggle with managing visitation and supervising concessions. And while many NGOs and government agencies see tourism as a way to finance management and turn to the private sector to provide opportunities, there is little information that synthesizes what we know. The Best Practice Guidelines on tourism in protected areas are among the most demanded Guidelines that IUCN publishes and yet many participants to the World Parks Congress were disappointed that tourism and visitor management were not included in the agenda as a major stream or crosscutting theme. Tourism and visitation are the means to better engage youth and others in conservation; living conservation and seeing what our natural heritage offers and how it supports human life is how we can effectively gain political support for conservation. But such engagement requires management, as I noted in Lesson 1 above. Turning tourism over to the private sector as a conduit for experiences may be appropriate in some situations, but that tourism still needs management and supervision. Managing tourism and visitation is not simple, as managers of such parks as Kruger National Park in South Africa, Yosemite in the US or Taishan in China can attest.

So, these are some lessons I learned from the Congress. Of course, there are many others that I observed, but in terms of managing tourism and visitation, this is what we need to address.

Communities, Tourism, Protected Areas and Visitor Experiences

High on the agenda of international conservation NGOs and government protected area agencies is enhancing the contribution of tourism to funding protected areas and their stewardship. This is important because (1) gaining political support for protected area stewardship requires that visitors have the opportunity to view, learn about and appreciate the natural heritage contained within them; and (2) visitation generates revenue and economic opportunity for people living in nearby communities who provide supporting services, everywhere from providing guiding and transportation to food, lodging and crafts and arts.

But good visitor experiences, which are at the heart of a successful tourism economy just don’t happen, they must be carefully constructed. This fact raises a number of important challenges and opportunities that I discuss in this special video. You can view the video by clicking on this link: http://youtu.be/C6AgQT4CqHY.

The Four Keys to Enhanced Protected Area Manager Performance

Recently, I participated in the Second Mobile Seminar on Sustainable Tourism and Protected Areas organized and sponsored by Colorado State University. The Seminar focused on the opportunities and challenges confronting protected area managers as they set to integrate two goals partly competing and partly overlapping: protecting the natural heritage at the foundation of the protected area and providing access to that heritage for visitors to view, enjoy and appreciate. This challenge is among the most significant facing management of protected areas globally as tourism and visitation are most likely the largest commercial use of these areas.

CSU had asked me to present about what challenges confronted managers as they sought to manage tourism and visitation. I have previously written about this challenge on the blog and had identified a set of professional competencies needed to address it. But meeting this challenge requires more than being competent, as I told the Seminar participants. Competently applying skills is only one component of enhanced managerial performance, particularly given an increased emphasis by conservation organizations on effective management of protected areas.

View the video that goes into a bit more detail: 

Here is how I see the four keys to enhanced performance and how we get there:

1.     Thinking critically – in the wicked and messy world of 21^st century protected area management, learning and thinking critically are paramount. As Jon Kohl and I argue in our soon to be released book, The Future has Other Plans, we can no longer argue or assume that the world is predictable, linear, understandable or stable. Rather it is dynamic, impossible to completely understand, complex and ever-changing. An ethic of daily learning is required to address the challenges—as well as the opportunities—we encounter daily in this environment. We need strong critical thinking skills to assess, evaluate and reflect upon the many proposals arriving on our desks. This means we need to be a bit of a skeptic, closely scrutinizing events, from global to local, to understand what they mean and their implications.

We build critical thinking skills through several pathways, most notably through tertiary education, but also through continuing education programs oriented toward creating understanding of why things occur, building frameworks to guide our thinking, and developing networks and communities of practice to test our ideas. Continuing education is generally the domain of universities and colleges because these institutions, while having handcuffs of their own, are not bound by particular agency policy and culture, are focused on uncovering truth, and often open our minds to ideas we do not see because of our organizational cultures.

2.      Acting Competently – we need managers that are proficient, that understand how things work, that drive and operate organizations in ways that are not only effective and efficient but equitable as well. Doing things right is important and this is probably the most valued attribute of managers and protected area staff. We need to build competency in protected area skill application just as we need our staff to think critically. We need managers who know how to design and implement interpretative programs, enforce rules and regulations, apply landscape level restoration, manage wildlife populations and administer concession contracts among other tasks.

Skill development is the domain of training—where staff understand what and how to do things, but not necessarily why they do these things. While universities often provide training, this is properly the domain of vocational programs and agency training centers, such as the U.S. Department of the Interior National Conservation Training Center. A university may not be the best place to learn the how to’s of law enforcement or how to design and implement a field data management program, but a training center or program would be.

3.     Deciding Confidently – managers must be able to make decisions that reflect themselves as self-assured and poised, that they feel good about having considered the alternatives and their consequences, that they have interacted with constituencies and staff about a preferred course of action, and that they have built monitoring and adaptive management protocols in the event their assumptions underlying the decision are proven questionable. There is often a fine line between being confident and being arrogant (say a feeling of being of superior intelligence or perception), so I mean here that decisions are made with a sense of humility.

Developing confidence requires mentoring—working jointly with more experienced and confident managers to appreciate their particular approach to making decisions. In this real-world cauldron of conflict and contention, of choice and uncertainty, and of change and complexity, this sense of confidence is needed for effective leadership. Mentoring and shadowing programs within the agency itself then are needed to help potential managers to develop this sense of confident humility about their decisions.

4.      Empowering Environments – Managers work within organizations, be they governmental, non-governmental or parastatals. Organizations have cultures, they have norms, they have expectations, they have traditions, and they have bureaucrats. Everybody has a boss with viewpoints, perspectives and priorities. This culture may disempower managers or empower them.

Libby Khumalo and I argue in a forthcoming article to be published in Tourism Recreation Research that empowerment means that organizations carefully manage the four types of power they wield, often unknowingly: the power over, or the ability to control people, their decisions, and behavior in order to ensure predictability and stability within an organization; the power to, or ability of a person to pursue their own goals within the context of an agency’s vision and mission; power with deals with collective power, the ability to get things done cooperatively and without formal coercion; and finally, power within, which is an increased will for change, expressed through self-confidence, assertiveness and awareness.

By empowering managers, organizations encourage them to think critically, act competently, and decide confidently—in other words to pursue the organization’s vision and mission with enthusiasm and with a focus on learning, both critically needed in the protected area world of the 21^st century.

Participants in the CSU Mobile Seminar on Sustainable Tourism and Protected Areas at Fairy Falls, Yellowstone National Park.