Measuring Stakeholder Perspectives on Environmental and Community Stability in a Tourism‐Dependent Economy

Abstract

Tourism is promoted as an environmentally beneficial activity for Caribbean economies. Yet degradation still occurs and more integrated policy approaches are needed. Using Q‐methodology within a social‐ecological system (SES) framework, we quantified the importance of various policy issues to stakeholders in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands, where tourism produces 77% of its GDP. Stakeholders agree Providenciales' economy benefits from a healthy marine environment, but disagree over which SES drivers are functionally important. Our results show that Q‐methodology is a robust tool for informing the policy‐making process and quantifying stakeholder views in a tourism‐dependent economy. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Environmental and Community Stability of a Mountain Destination: An Analysis of Residents’ Perception

“…In the end, participants can give a brief explanation why they chose some Q sort. Q methodology has been widely used in environmental studies [39][40][41][42] and more and more for critical interpretation in tourism studies [21,[43][44][45].…”

“…Previous research [20] has shown how important is SES to be a part of development planning, since it can have great influence on raising the standard of living of people who depend on natural resources. In order to gain sustainable local development, SES highlights that successful natural resource managing can be achieved by managing members of local community who use those resources for food, livelihood and identity [21]. Therefore, stakeholders and community have significant role in managing natural resources [22] and policy development [23].…”

“…Mountain ecosystems, communities and economies are exposed to the positive and negative impacts of tourism development. These impacts can be divided into three groups [11,21,26]:…”

“…Authors interviewed 29 different stakeholders-local business owners (7), members of non-governmental organizations (3), local elected officials (3), employees from national park Kopaonik (2), Institute for nature conservation of Serbia (2) and Ski resorts of Serbia (2) and citizens (10) to collect information on the current condition of tourism development on Kopaonik and future stakeholders' expectations for the development of Kopaonik. Other sources external to the study such as standardize instruments and previous studies related to the examination of tourism impact [7,21,46,47] were used to build the concourse. 63 unique statements were collected concerning tourism development and its impact on local community in mountain resorts.…”

“…According to previous research [51,52], it is shown that one of the basic preconditions for successful planning and management of the sustainable tourism development is the active involvement of the local population in this process and that any use of resources for the purposes of tourism development, without the consent of the local community, may be assessed by the local population as an abuse and constitute a disincentive factor in the tourism development [53]. The good thing is that local residents (both groups) expressed positive attitude towards the impact of tourism activities on the quality of public services (21). All stakeholders agree that internal partnership can be an important factor for successful development of Kopaonik area through active participation and collaboration of local community (22).…”