درک عمومی گردشگری پایدار

If tourism is to become part of a more sustainable lifestyle, changes are needed to the patterns of behaviour adopted by the public. This paper presents the results of research conducted amongst members of the public in England on their understanding of sustainable tourism; their response to four desired tourism behaviour goals, and expectations about the role of government and the tourism industry in encouraging sustainable tourism. The research shows a lack of awareness of tourism’s impact relative to day-to-day behaviour, feelings of disempowerment and an unwillingness to make significant changes to current tourism behaviour.

Urry (2008) argues that social sciences have no choice but to engage with various futures, principal amongst which is the challenge of climate change. While technological innovations in alternative fuels and energy saving devices may provide some comfort (or distraction) the scale of advance needed means they are unlikely to produce the efficiencies necessary to avoid the dangerous climate change territory described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 and Stern, 2006. Hence, this original work is situated within the literature of behaviour change and considers whether members of the public are willing to consume differently, and/or consume less through changes to their tourism behaviour in order to progress the transition towards a more sustainable lifestyle. The UK Government’s Sustainable Development Strategy and report by the Sustainable Development Commission and National Consumer Council through the Sustainable Consumption Roundtable (2006) recognised the need to explore public responses towards actions for sustainable lifestyles and their interactions with broader lifestyle aspirations. Addressing this strategy, this paper presents results of empirical research conducted for the UK government Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), on public understanding of sustainable tourism, as part of Defra’s programme of work on sustainable consumption and production. The remit of the research undertaken for this project was to investigate people’s understanding of sustainability as it applied to tourism and leisure, although this paper presents the results of the findings related only to tourism. The findings from the research are designed to feed into a Behaviour Change Strategy and the Citizens and Mass Engagement Programme. Parallel projects examined public understanding and willingness to change behaviour related to energy use in the home, transport, finance and investment and food, and some of the synthesis findings of these projects are incorporated within this paper. Recognising the alternative futures possible, Defra felt that to make the transition towards a more sustainable lifestyle, a fuller understanding of residents’ response to sustainable tourism was needed. The three research objectives set by Defra and addressed in this paper are: firstly, to explore public understanding of sustainable tourism; secondly, to establish responses by members of the public to Defra’s four tourism behaviour goals, and finally to establish expectations about the role of government and the tourism industry in the supply of sustainable tourism opportunities. The four behaviour goals were: first, to encourage the UK as a holiday destination; second, to travel less or combine travel; third, to choose more sustainable travel methods; and fourth to choose more sustainable activities whilst on holiday.

This research has shown a low level of awareness about the impacts of the tourism industry and appropriate response options. Where there was greater awareness, this tended to be on the tangible impacts such as littering rather than the intangible impacts of global warming. Respondents were resistant to change their behaviour unless other people and developing countries changed, often expressing a sense of entitlement to enjoy their holidays as they chose, unencumbered by the need to think about the impacts it was having. The research identified drivers and inhibitors for each of the four behaviour goals, revealing potential to encourage more domestic holidays and more sustainable travel methods, while encouraging people to travel less, combine travel and to undertake different activities seems certain to face greater resistance. Respondents seem to place greater responsibility on government to address the problem than any other group, including themselves while politicians needed to set an example through their own behaviour and show leadership, instead of hypocrisy. The authors reject the conclusions of the ‘deficit’ models of behaviour change, that pro-environmental behaviour can be achieved by simply improving awareness of the problem. Change will need to be orchestrated by going far beyond the provision of information (Collins, Thomas, Willis, & Wilsdon, 2003). Similarly, the Theory of Planned Behaviour seems too simplistic to apply to tourism where behaviour is heavily influenced by a myriad of factors overlaid with an absence of reasoned thought. Instead, this paper suggests listening to the language of respondents in discussing ‘entitlement’ and their ‘rights’ to holidays, and then to think about the responsibilities this brings forth. If a right is always matched by a responsibility (for example, a right to life carries a responsibility not to take a life) then tourism needs to emphasise what is the responsibility carried alongside the right to holiday. The concept of reciprocity may encourage tourists to think about what they are responsible for, if they believe they are entitled to visit freely (Halpern et al., 2004). The challenge then will become to develop a sense of personal responsibility for the impacts developed by taking a holiday. Such a development may sit comfortably with a desire for government to empower citizens to make decisions rather than to correct problems once they are manifest. One way in which personal responsibility can be enhanced and supported is through connecting people and overcoming the sense of disempowerment obvious from this research. This connection could be made by providing feedback at a local level about the effects of pro-environmental consumption decisions (Moisander, 2007). Appropriate mechanisms would need to be explored for this, but the feedback could illustrate the difference it is possible to make and provide social proof of change. A number of possible practical actions can be drawn from the research: such as the need for labelling of the sustainability of tourism products; the promotion of personal carbon allowances and a ‘carbon calculator’ to understand tourism’s relationship with these allowances; the creation of priority lanes for boarding planes (or similar) for those who have offset their emissions; and the introduction of ‘metering’ in hotels to allow guests to be charged for the resources they consume. These actions could begin to break cycles of action, create positive examples and champions and so lead to the creation of new social norms. Further, pro-environmental behaviour could be encouraged through physical and virtual networks to develop and cement the connections between people, and the connections between people and their actions. Olli, Grendstad, and Wollebaek (2001) describe how the most important predictor of environmental behaviour they found was participation in environmental networks as this creates group norms to guide new behaviour and overcome the social dilemma of what is best for society in the long term versus what is best for the individual more immediately. The ‘weight-watchers’ programme may provide an example of how difficult changes to behaviour are made possible with group support. Hence, initiatives like community based social marketing and utilising social networking tools such as ‘facebook’ may have currency for the tourism industry to overcome public disempowerment and lack of understanding to support pro-environmental behaviour change. Any behaviour changes will of course be contingent on there being a supply of pro-environmental holiday options available to absorb new-found motivations to act, lest they become frustrated at the constraining situational factors and adjust their values back, but now more resistant to any future messages of the need to change. Finally, the study of ‘tourism’ needs to be reduced to its constituent elements for a more useful understanding of public perceptions of pro-environmental alternatives. Hence, thinking about the transport, accommodation and activities decisions people make may be more beneficial than trying to make the suite of decisions more sustainable. Further research will be needed on the segmentation model to see if there are groups of consumers who are more or less receptive to messages of change, for what reasons and how receptive they may be to ideas of responsibility. Any possible behaviour changes need to be modelled to understand what their effects might be. Indicators of the effects of tourism will be necessary to provide some evidence for this debate, but the answers will lie in the normative ethic we choose to pursue. Encouraging people to holiday in the UK may have considerable effects on congestion in tourism destinations already busy with tourists to the UK, but there would be a reduction of positive impacts in overseas countries caused by an increase in domestic tourism, and strategies to address this reduced earning potential would be essential in order that less sustainable alternatives to tourism are not taken up as income replacement activities. To encourage the reduction of overseas tourism as a way to reduce climate change makes enormous decisions about the importance of the environment over society, the future over the present, life ‘here’ over life ‘there’ and those who know, over those who do not. Less tourism may not lead to improved global sustainability, but if demand from tourists is not less, then it must be different.