Managing off-trail walking behaviour in national parks

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this viewpoint paper is to provide practical managerial strategies to address the problematic behaviour of visitor non-compliance at national parks. This paper provides a descriptive overview of current non-compliant behaviours in national parks and offer suggested practical solutions and directions. Although past studies have explored the underlying motivations behind visitor non-compliance in national parks, research on management tactics to curb this problematic behaviour remains limited. Therefore, more attention is needed to solve this perennial issue. While most national parks use a combination of both direct and indirect management tactics to manage off-trail walking behaviour, it is recommended park managers try using indirect management tools first before converting to rigid authoritative direct management approaches to manage non-compliant behaviours in national parks. This paper also advocates for future research to identify reasons behind non-compliant behaviour in national parks and examine the effectiveness of direct and indirect management tools across different visitor segments to address this problematic behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Off-Trail walking behaviour
• national parks
• non-compliant behaviour
• management approaches
• direct and indirect management tools

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edmund Goh

Edmund Goh, PhD, is Senior Lecturer, Hospitality and Tourism Management, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He has published in leading journals such as Tourism Management, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, International Journal of Hospitality Management, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Journal of Vacation Marketing, Journal of Tourism and Travel Marketing, Tourism Management Perspectives, and Tourism Recreation Research. Edmund sees his research as the nexus to address academia and industry gaps.