Open Collections

Hu, Fangbing

University of British Columbia

Gateway communities are crucial to national park management, and the impacts of national parks on gateway communities are mostly related to tourism. Residents' perceptions of tourism could reveal people's interactions with national parks, thereby affecting management effectiveness. However, residents' perceptions of tourism impacts are rarely emphasized in national park gateway communities in North America and the variables associated with local support haven't been completely identified. This thesis explored residents' perceptions and examined the criteria used by previous scholars to identify the impact factors and investigate local support for tourism. A survey-based questionnaire instrument collected residents' perceptions (n = 790) in the gateway communities of the two most-visited national parks in North America. This study (Chapter 3) found that the main issues in the gateway communities at Banff National Park were noise pollution, a lack of infrastructure, visitor environmental education, and environmental issues related to water, air and garbage disposal. Residents' perceived impacts of tourism development were primarily reflected in community life, natural environment, cultural development, quality of life, and economic development, and the intermediate gateway community residents perceived most impacts from tourism. The local support by studied gateway communities of BNP was associated with the natural environment, cultural development and quality of life factors identified from exploratory factor analysis, and the core GC residents were most supportive. Further, this study (Chapter 4) found a discrepancy between the expected level of park development and community status, and corresponding management measures need to be taken. Tourism development mainly caused environmental and social-cultural issues rather than economic issues. It was also found that support for tourism (ST) was highly associated with community participation (CP), the living environment (LE), trust in tourism agencies (TT), tourism benefits (TB), and community satisfaction (CS). Moreover, this study provided recommendations for both local authorities to better manage the gateway communities by prioritizing environment management, optimizing the use of environmental resources, and obtaining residents’ support by the positive aspects identified in this study. Aside from that, the study recommended that park managers provide economic benefits to local stakeholders and environmental education to visitors. Lastly, some limitations were addressed.

Text

2023-03-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/79620

Forestry

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/