What is Overtourism and What Can We Do About It?

Part IV

I concluded the last part by proposing a tentative definition of what Overtourism is, and now I will turn to presenting a starting point to addressing it. In this Part, and the concluding Part, I will cite some literature, most of it accessible, but written in English. Few people write about management of visitation and tourism in protected areas, so nearly all of what I cite is my own work and that of close colleagues. I invite others to add to this work in responses to these essays.

To address Overtourism, a number of things are needed. We need a set of principles which underlie planning and management actions, and we need a framework to help us build our situational awareness and help apply critical thinking skills (see for example https://www.academia.edu/3612776/A_Heuristic_Framework_for_Reflecting_on_Protected_Areas_and_Their_Stewardship_in_the_21st_Century). Of course, we will also need to reflect upon our own mental models of the situation and recognize that we can benefit from complexity thinking (https://www.academia.edu/11847185/Benefitting_from_Complexity_thinking). We need to plan more holistically, as Jon Kohl and I noted in the Future has Other Plans.

Today, I am going focus on principles and frameworks, but this will be very brief. For about 30 years, I have operating on a number of visitor management “principles” (they are probably more like insights than princples, but principles sounds better!). They have been derived from research and professional experience with visitor management, and they have been written in such a way as to cross types of protected areas, marine, terrestrial, cultural, natural, local parks as well as World Heritage Sites. These 11 principles are stated in Table 1. I will only discuss one of them, but you can read short summaries here (https://www.academia.edu/941160/Protected_Area_Planning_Principles_and_Strategies).

I will not say much more about these principles here, but would like to demonstrate Principle 4, impacts are inevitable consequences of visitor use. Research on the use/impact relationship by such scientists as David Cole, Yu-Fai Leung and Jeff Marion (see for example, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeffrey_Marion/publication/251808453_Recreation_Impacts_and_Management_in_Wilderness_A_State-of-Knowledge_Review/links/552414cc0cf2caf11bfcbf37.pdf) shows that a little bit of initial use leads to a disproportionae amount of impact the relationship looks like this, schematically with use level on the X axis and impact on the Y axis

The nature of this relationship means that where we already experience high levels of use, we will have high levels of impacts, and reducing use (and only use) will have little impact. This is true in both the biophysical and social domains. For example, the visitation at Yellowstone National Park is currently over 4 million visits per year, way to the right side of this graphic. It has a certain infrastructure that will not change even if use drops to 2 million or less visitors. The impacts of past decisions are here to stay, absent some major systemic level decision.

The graph also shows that focus of decisions ought to be ( and I respectfully suggest this) on the Y axis, the amount of impact that is acceptable. Since the curve that is in the graph is an average, there is variability around it. That variability means that factors other than use level influence impact, things such as visitor behavior, type of use, season of use, soils, visitor expectations and motivations and so on. For example on my recent family visit to Yellowstone. I knew visitation would be high, so my expectation were more in terms of family togetherness and learning, and viewing landscapes, and lots of bison than having the park to myself.

This graph also means that spreading use more evenly, sometimes advocated by protected area managers and academics is probably not the best strategy for minimizing impacts.

Finally, in this brief essay, we can think where we set the standard, at what point on the Y axis and how we make the decision and how that decision is made. Important questions about the role of science and public engagement.

Lets turn to frameworks for managing visitation and providing opportunities for quality visitor experiences. There are several, including but not limited to the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, Limits of Acceptable Change, Visitor Experience and Resource Protection, Tourism Optimization and Management Model. They were mainly developed to respond to a carrying capacity approach which has failed both in theory and practice (for a short overview, see https://www.academia.edu/22773434/Rethinking_Carrying_Capacity). Each of these are described here, which was originally written for American protected area managers, so the first couple of chapters may not be that informative for many (https://www.academia.edu/394989/An_assessment_of_frameworks_useful_for_public_land_recreation_planning). Warning, this last document is more of a book than a short article.

Recently, the federal land management agencies in the U.S. have put together an Interagency Visitor Use Management Process, which was the subject of two TAPAS sponsored webinars. I think this would also be a good starting point for discussions about what we can do about overtourism, although again, several of the components are related only to U.S. policy and law. Read about it here: https://visitorusemanagement.nps.gov/VUM/Framework.

An important note: the frameworks here are not answers or solutions. What they do is help guide us through the critical thinking needed to address the challenges of managing visitors in protected areas. They are process oriented. Those who apply them use their own special knowledge of a local protected area and apply that in the frameworks.

What is Overtourism and What to Do About It?

Part III

I am one of the most fortunate people around. In my career, I have worked with many different protected area managers and members of the public. I know many of them, most of them actually, to be amazing people doing great work to protect incredible places under often difficult circumstances. Their passion is nature and they are eager to learn. Both are prerequisites for working in the complex, uncertain and changing times of the 21^st century.

Learning is critical to success. And yet, we all carry around with us mental models that interfere with our learning. At the same time, diving deeper to understand and then change our mental models about managing visitor use and tourism is necessary because that is where our greatest leverage point for change lies. Lloyd Gardner in his comment on the TAPAS group List Serve  got at this when he noted that “Maybe we should consider the issue of overcrowding from the perspective of impact instead of cause.” Lloyd has suggested changing the mental model or question we ask which is very, very important.

Fundamentally, the question we face in managing visitors and tourism is “How much impact is acceptable or appropriate?” There are two parts to addressing this question. Part 1 is where science comes in, in establishing the relationship between visitation (and all aspects, not just numbers of visitors) and amount of impact, both biophysical and social. Its where we spend most of our resources when thinking about management, bringing in the scientist to tell us what to do. But the role of science is limited, because of Part 2, which is to make a value judgment about how impact is acceptable. That judgment must consider the science, yes, but also the trade-offs inherent in deciding if the maximum acceptable impact is higher or lower. Making that value judgment requires that all kinds constituencies be engaged to negotiate how much change we are willing to tolerate.

Now the term negotiate may seem terrible to some of you. But we are already doing this, and have done so since our genes came together to produce homo sapiens. We decide, often implicitly, and even subconciously, when environmental conditions are too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too barren, when there are too many predators that might eat us, or when there are not enough animals to support us. We respond by discussing the situation and changing our behavior. We have done this. In a more contemporary sense, we do this when developing standards for air pollution, water quality, acceptable unemployment rates, even when reading essays published on the internet (is this essay exciting enough, informative enough? If not we go elsewhere.)

When dealing with publicly managed resources, such as protected areas it is important to engage the constituencies impacted by them and their management. This is one reason behind the interest in connecting people with nature, to create a sense of ownership.

In terms of protected areas and the notion of overtourism, at the foundation is the values that are being protected, but also the visitor’s experience. We are pretty familiar with the biophysical values, but at the heart of the overtourism dialogue is deep concern about a visitor’s experience and also about what is happening in the local community and its residents (e.g., discussions about tourism in Venice).

Now sitting in a 2km long traffic jam in Yellowstone National Park is not my ideal visitor experience, nor I would estimate, the desired visitor experience of all the other visitors in that bison jam. But it is a trade-off you may have to make if you want to see the park in late July. But without a vision, without a statement of the desired conditions and experience, we simply don’t know, as managers, if we are being successful, because we have no explict presentation of acceptable conditions. (I note that managers will apply their personal standards of acceptable change but that is done implicitly and without the benefit of public review, deliberation and discussion.)

By visitor experience, I mean the kind of social-psychological benefits of participating in an activity within a particular setting. Things such as appreciating nature and scenery, learning about nature, challenge, a sense of adventure, escape, solitude, family cohesiveness, and so on. Not all these dimensions are equally important in every situation these and many other dimensions are potentially operative.

I would argue that overtourism occurs when conditions on the ground (e.g., visitor numbers, bison jams, visitor behavior) exceed our limit of acceptable change or our ability to receive the experience we seek, or management seeks to facilitate. It may also occur if conditions in communities fundamentally change its ability to function as a community its residents desire. And it might occur when negative impacts occur that are not acceptable to the values being protected. Maybe this is just a working definition and needs some improvement, maybe a lot of improvement.

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.