Nature-based tourism in protected areas: a systematic review of socio-economic benefits and costs to local people

ABSTRACT

Nature-based tourism, which includes visits to protected areas, is a growing trend. This may include consumptive and non-consumptive activities, with nature-based tourists being motivated to experience local culture and nature. Thus, tourism can contribute economically and socially to communities associated with protected areas, with the outcomes being both benefits and costs to local people. We carried out a systematic literature review to document and characterise the outcomes of nature-based tourism for people living in and around protected areas (terrestrial and inland waters). We evaluated 89 papers published from 1996 to 2020, most of which were conducted in low- and middle-income countries. The main benefits were employment, business opportunities and income, and the main costs were acculturation and abandonment of traditional lifestyle/practices, price inflation and conflict/crime. While most benefits were economic, most costs were socio-cultural. We found that benefits were most frequently experienced individually and costs experienced mostly at the collective or community levels. Inconsistencies in reporting of impacts suggests that future research should take a more consistent and systematic approach to evaluating benefits and costs of nature-based tourism from both the demographic and geographic perspectives, be more inclusive, and pay equal attention to objective and subjective measures of costs and benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Local people
• nature-based tourism
• protected areas
• socio-economic benefit
• socio-economic cost
• systematic literature review

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support provided by Lalmani Gautam in preparing Figure 3. Alexis Harerimana helped with the strategies on literature search and EndNote during the early phase. Kamal Thapa is supported by postgraduate research scholarship from James Cook University.

Disclosure statement

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

Credit roles

Kamal Thapa: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Analysis, Writing – Original draft. David King: Writing – review & editing. Zsuzsa Banhalmi-Zakar: Methodology, Writing – review and editing. Amy Diedrich: Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review and editing.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. Journal discipline (subject classification) was identified through the Ulrichs Web Global Serials Directory (http://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com/) and most of the journals were assigned to more than one discipline.