Abstract
Wildlife tourism consists of people viewing and/or encountering wildlife (Newsome et al., 2005). These often close encounters with wildlife tourism can produce direct and significant negative impacts on wildlife, their habitat, and adjacent communities (Higginbottom, 2004). With this in mind, it is important to ensure that wildlife tourism developments are undertaken following sustainable principles, to avoid or at least minimise potential negative impacts. In a similar way to many other activities based on the utilisation of natural resources, wildlife tourism faces a range of challenges to the way that it has been practised, with calls for new and innovative approaches. The utilitarian anthropocentric paradigm of ‘dominion over nature’ (Gadgil and Berkes, 1991) and the use of reductionist approaches to deal with complex problems (Ruitenbeek and Cartier, 2001) are considered to be increasingly less applicable in contemporary natural resource management. There has been a call for a shift from conventional reductionist approaches, to new nonlinear complex adaptive system approaches. These ideas also challenge the paradigm of sustainability, from its focus on achieving and maintaining stability to a focus on enhancing resilience to disturbance, based on the understanding that the world is constantly changing and evolving and therefore, characterised by uncertainty.
The management of natural resources, including activities such as nature-based tourism, requires a better understanding of the relationship between human and natural systems, and a better knowledge of methods to address complex social-ecological systems (Farrell and Twining-Ward, 2004). In this context, the adaptive co-management framework, which combines the ideas of collaboration amongst stakeholders and learning-by-doing, presents itself as a useful interdisciplinary approach. The overall experience to date with ACM suggests it may be a useful framework for addressing uncertainty and complexity in the management of natural resources such as forestry, fishery, farming and the management of protected areas. Since tourism systems are described as Complex Adaptive Tourism Systems (CATS) and tourist destinations can be regarded as social-ecological systems (Farrell and Twining-Ward, 2004), the prospects for adaptive co-management in tourism seem are strong (Plummer and Fennell, 2009, Plummer et al., 2013b).
This thesis aims to critically examine prospects for the sustainable management of wildlife tourism using adaptive co-management. Given that the object of study falls into the domain, critical realism was chosen as research paradigm, since it provides an adequate philosophical ontology for the study of complexity (Harvey and Reed, 1997, Byrne, 1998, Bhaskar, 2008, Jörg, 2011). The research takes a qualitative approach, conducted through an instrumental case study that examines the wildlife tourism activity of shark cage diving near Stewart Island, New Zealand. Shark cage diving consists of close encounters with sharks in their own habitat carried out by divers submerged in a shark-proof cage built of steel. This wildlife tourism activity is carried out to see great white sharks in several places around the world, including Stewart Island, New Zealand. There are contentious issues concerning the use of food to attract the sharks to the cage due to the possible Pavlovian conditioning of the sharks to the sound of boat motors (Dobson, 2006), which may in turn generate an aggressive behaviour toward divers and other marine users, endangering their livelihoods (Burgess, 1998, Dobson, 2008). On Stewart Island, several members of the community are concerned about the possibility of sharks being conditioned by the use of food during shark cage diving, due to its possible negative effects. They fear that their safety and livelihoods can be put in jeopardy if the sharks become more aggressive. Social issues are the fear and social tension that the shark cage diving operations have produced within the community; ecological issues are the potential changes in the behaviour and safety of wildlife. As can be noted, this case was chosen because it presents a particularly interesting situation characterised by some contentious issues regarding the management of wildlife and the effects –actual and potentials– that it is producing on the local community. The complexity of the situation and the wide variety of stakeholders involved generate interesting prospects for the application of an adaptive co-management framework.
Three methods of data collection were used: semi-structured in-depth interviews, archival research, and participant observation. The subsequent interpretation of the data collected was conducted using a process of ‘thematic analysis’ which consisted of the coding of the qualitative information based on patterns. These patterns arise from the identification of the key elements of the ACM framework, and the roles of the stakeholders identified in the Integrated Conceptual Model of Adaptive co-management of Wildlife Tourism proposed in this thesis. The analysis included the study of the role, relevance and involvement of each stakeholder, the presence of the core components of adaptive co-management in the case study, and the analysis of the roles that the stakeholders play, and the relations among them in the context of the shark cage diving operations. The analysis aims to identify the favourable conditions and constraints for the implementation of an ACM framework.
The analysis reveals that prospects for an ACM approach to wildlife tourism, in general, are strong, with ACM presenting itself as a useful framework to address issues in which conventional resources management frameworks are failing to address, such as multi-stakeholders conflicts and the management of common-pool resources. Critical factors were identified in relation to the potential implementation of an adaptive co-management framework for the case study and arguably wildlife tourism in general. Issues related to communication channels, the need for community engagement, the need for leadership, the involvement of tourists and the tourism industry, the representation of wildlife in adaptive co-management, and the need for flexible adaptive frameworks, offer several challenges for the implementation of adaptive co-management. However, other facilitating factors regarding rich social capital and evidence of successful co-management in related natural resource management provide evidence for optimism that the implementation of adaptive co-management may be fruitful in such settings.