Tourism and Natural World Heritage: A Complicated Relationship

There are legal, political, economic, social, and environmental links between tourism and World Heritage Areas, some straightforward but others controversial. These are examined here as aspects of a long-term, stable, but complicated, relationship. Management of small-scale mobile tourism operations is well established. It includes activities, equipment, timing, numbers, group size, marketing, fees, and permit latency. Management of large-scale fixed-site tourism infrastructure and accommodation involving private equity or operational control is more controversial. It includes legal structure of partnership arrangements, and allocation of revenues, costs, and risks. The relationship framework shows the importance of picking partners carefully and establishing mechanisms for external counseling. Research opportunities include: the marketing value of World Heritage Area (WHA) controversies; the tourism effects of In Danger declarations; funding models; and impact assessment, stakeholder roles, and co-management mechanisms, in different jurisdictions. Quantifying these effects needs large-scale compilation and comparison of case studies.