Doctoral Dissertation Research: Conservation, Culture, and Common Pool Resources

Both developed and developing countries utilize tourism to protect biodiverse spaces while bolstering the economy. However, balance between tourism development, environmental conservation, and community benefits is hard to achieve. It is necessary to research the challenges and opportunities to accomplish such balance to inform future tourism governance. Research should particularly focus on islands where land is limited and isolated, there is high endemism, and economies are heavily reliant on tourism. To address this need, this doctoral dissertation study examines social and environmental implications of tourism governance in an island setting. The project trains a graduate student in methods of scientific data collection and analysis and builds capacity for the future conduct of scientific research in this setting. The data and findings are being disseminated to improve the public’s understanding of science and the scientific method, through colloquia, guest, and other communicative platforms outside academia. This research applies common pool resource (CPR) governance theory to tourism in a novel way to help understand governance more thoroughly. Although historically used to explain natural resources, tourists can also be considered a CPR. CPRs are characterized by exclusion and subtraction. Resource users are nearly impossible to exclude, and one user’s gain is another’s loss. In tourism, tourists can be considered the resource, and those employed by tourism considered the users. Through the application of CPR governance to tourism, the study’s research questions consider formal and informal tourism management strategies, power dynamics among stakeholders, differing property rights regimes, and environmental impacts in and out of designated protected areas. The focus of the research in a major UNESCO World Heritage Site proves an ideal location to study socioecological balance and tourism governance, as the site’s famous wildlife drives the local economy through ecotourism. This ethnographic study utilizes 100 semi-structured interviews of stakeholders to capture community perspectives of tourism governance. Data analysis includes deductive and inductive coding of collected materials. The results engage with and further develop CPR governance theory by considering tourists as a mobile resource and users as those dependent on tourism, Additionally, results inform decision-makers on how to better address the balance between tourism, conservation, and community well-being, especially in island settings. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.