Framing and researching the impacts of visitation and use in protected areas

Abstract

[Extract] This chapter provides an overview of the thinking behind and the implementation of an environmental psychological, transactional, approach to the impacts of visitation and use in protected area management and Word Heritage Area contexts. This more social science-based and interdisciplinary approach to natural resource management incorporates both environmental impact assessment (EIA) and monitoring and social impact assessment (SIA), and integrates and synthesizes the logic of these approaches with an environmental psychological perspective and methodology, allowing for a consideration and integration of individual experience and behaviour within the context of a World Heritage Area encounter. Importantly, this approach simultaneously considers the impacts of World Heritage Areas on visitors as well as the impacts of visitors on the biophysical environment and on the local social environment. The resulting psychosocial impact assessment (PSIA) model and framework (e.g. Reser & Bentrupperbaumer 2001a) provides a more accessible and cross-disciplinary sampling and decision-making framework for strategic research consideration and the selection of variables, relationships, processes and measures. This approach also directly addresses the needs of managers when considering the people side of natural resource and protected area management, as it takes into account not only visitor perceptions, expectations, needs and concerns, but also the nature of their experience, encounters and impacts within a World Heritage or other protected area, and direct natural resource planning and management implications.