Active engagement with nature: outdoor adventure tourism,sustainability and wellbeing

Abstract

This article draws on the conflicting arguments surrounding outdoor adventure tourism activities to determine if such activities might usefully be considered beneficial for humans and nature, and how they might offer avenues for sustainable tourism practice. Research in the field has often examined outdoor adventure activities through a lens that either highlights their negative environmental impacts or has sought to conceptualise motivations and/or experiences. In this article, we argue that through practices that are often seen as destructive, there is the possibility to think differently about human-nature relationships and pro-environmentalism. To explore these issues, we draw on data collected from a series of semi-structured interviews with outdoor adventure tourists. Our analysis highlights how outdoor adventure tourism facilitates reconnections to nature, offering potential wellbeing impacts and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. We conclude that outdoor adventure activities as a form of sustainable tourism have potential implications for our understanding of, and engagement with, sustainability, mental health and wellbeing.     

Payments or Persuasion: Common Pool Resource Management with Price and Non-price Measures

We use lab experiments to study policies that address common pool resource overuse. We look at a price mechanism, specifically a Pigouvian subsidy, and four non-price interventions. The non-price policies are information alone, information with a normative message, communication alone, and normative messages with communication allowed. In all experiment sessions, no intervention occurs in the first seven and last seven rounds, allowing us to examine the effects of introducing and taking away a policy. The subsidy leads to near-efficient extraction, but surprisingly leads groups that were not over-extracting to also reduce extraction. This over-compliance decreases efficiency, although on net the subsidy is the most efficiency-enhancing intervention. Information provision, communication, normative appeals, and normative appeals combined with communication all reduce over-extraction (though by less than the subsidy) without exacerbating over-compliance; however, the effects of information alone and communication alone are small and not robust. The non-price policies cause a decline in over-extraction of from 0.549 (information) to 11.441 % (normative appeals with communication). These effects are of the same order of magnitude as the effects seen in major field studies of conservation messaging. The subsidy has the worst persistence properties (after the intervention ceases), while normative messages with communication have the best.     

Coping with Stress in Outdoor Recreational Settings: An Application of Transactional Stress Theory

This study uses a transactional model of stress and coping as a way to understand how outdoor recreationists deal with negative setting elements during a recreation experience. Within the transactional model, coping behaviors can be viewed as the result of on-going transactions among personal and environmental factors, perceptions of threat or stress, and the perceived effectiveness of coping strategies. The current study focuses specifically on the relationship between reported levels of stress and the types of coping strategies used by recreationists in Glacier National Park. Findings suggest that certain behavioral and cognitive coping responses to stress are associated with different levels of reported stress. Specifically, respondents with lower levels of stress were more likely to engage in certain cognitive adjustments to cope with detracting situations. Respondents reporting higher levels of stress were more likely to engage in either direct action aimed at changing the environmental conditions or are displaced entirely from the recreational setting. In addition to these primary findings, the study discusses the range of coping behaviors employed.     

Applications of parks management information systems

The paper presents a conceptual model of an integrated management information system for municipal parks maintenance and operations. Research efforts in management information systems are presented in three categories: Business Research, Federally Sponsored Research, and Park and Recreation Systems Research. A case is made for further empirical research, the development of normative models, and evaluative criteria in an attempt to realize the full potential of electronic data processing in parks and recreation.     

Local Planning for Recreation and Tourism: A Case Study of Mountain Biking from New Zealand's Manawatu Region

At the local level, planning for recreation and tourism is not necessarily a straight forward process. Local policy makers may be unable to reflect the complexity of the planning process, particularly when it should consider a variety of views representing different stakeholders. In addition, those involved in planning for recreation and tourism have often treated such activities in isolation from other factors which make up the social, environmental and economic fabric of a region. One of the reasons for this may belack of data, and the research in this article seeksto redress a similarlack in relation to mountain biking in the Manawatu Region of New Zealand. The recent increase in the number of mountain bikers world-wide has prompted studies in the USA and New Zealand, which have indicated a growing concern with environmental impacts, demonstrated attitudes of other recreationalists to mountain bikers and identified a number of management issues. This article presents research conducted in association with the Palmerston North City Council. It suggests that planning for recreation and tourism is often an ad hoc and reactive process and recommends the adoption of a more iterative approach.     

Reasonableness and Section 4 of the Employment Act 1980

This article explains the origins of s.4 of the Employment Act 1980 and assesses the place of this provision in the corpus of labour legislation enacted by the Conservative government since 1980. Its principal aim is to concentrate upon the concept of reasonableness which is central to the operation of the provision and to evaluate critically the role of the EAT and the industrial tribunals in interpreting it. Finally, the article seeks to assess the impact of the tribunaľs interpretation of s.4 on union admission and expulsion procedures.     

Teaching Net Present Value Analysis: Returns-to-Assets versus Returns-to-Equity

We survey textbooks from agricultural economics and other subject matter areas to determine their treatments of the returns-to-assets versus returns-to-equity methods for determining the net present value of investment projects. Textbook authors disagree about the appropriate method, often give conflicting advice as to how a given method should be applied, and do not show how the results of the two methods can be reconciled. We provide a consolidated discussion of the circumstances under which the two methods produce the same net present value.