The Research Of Community Involvement In Geoparks From The Perspective Of Social Capital

With the acceleration of the globalization process, the development of the economy has brought great benefits to mankind, but it also has changed the ecological system of the whole world, resource depletion, environmental degradation, spatial structural imbalance and other issues have become increasingly serious. The rapid degradation of the ecosystem and the extreme shortage of resources cause people to pay attention to the natural area continuously and it also stimulates an incentive to the establishment of protected areas.As a special form of protected area, Geopark refers to the natural area that contains a certain amount of geological heritage resources, which are of special importance, rarity and aesthetic. Since 2000, China has gradually become the country with the most rapid construction and development in the geopark. Geopark aims to protect the geological relics, carry out scientific research and science popularization activities and promote regional economic development for the purpose of construction. It showed good economic and social benefits at the beginning of its establishment and it largely eased some of the environmental, social and resource issues. However, as people gradually recognize and strong demand for geopark, it leads to a series of issues such as the division of protected areas is lack of scientific nature; management is chaotic; the development process is too radical and so on. There are two main reasons for this:the first reason is the "market failure" phenomenon caused by the publicity and externality of geological resources in the development process of the geopark; the second reason is the "government failure" caused by the traditional government led development model in the geopark.In this context, the importance of community participation is highlighted. From a macro point of view, community participation in the development and protection of the geopark is one of the motives of the geopark construction and one of the development goals of the geopark; From the community point of view, it is the community’s own development needs and it is one of the effective way of community transformation. However, because of the uneven allocation of resources and the lack of healthy social capital constraints, the community cannot be fully involved in the public affairs of the geopark so as to play its role.Social capital is an international academic focus in the fields of sociology, economics, political science and other disciplines in recent years, which is considered to be "the missing link" in the process of sustainable development." The relationship between social capital and community research has been considered to be inseparable from the 1950’s. In recent years, it has been widely applied to the study of community participation in the management of natural resources because of the influence of social capital on the behavior consciousness and the role of collective action. Foreign scholars have noticed the positive role of social capital in the management of natural resources earlier. After making related study and research on the concept of social capital, its forming process and mechanism in combination with the community, it shows that the core factors of social capital:trust, social norms and common rules constrain the behavior of the individual in the management of natural resources. Higher social capital communities have more confidence in collective action, and their collective sense of belonging is more intense, so people will consciously believe that others will follow the same rules, at the same time, they also limit their access to natural resources and take a sustainable utilization way. The combination of social capital and public management theory provides a new way for the sustainable utilization and management of natural resources in many ecological systems in the world.The importance of social capital is also reflected in the community participation of the geopark:Social capital is the intrinsic motivation to promote the optimization and transformation of the industrial structure of the geopark community. It promotes the community residents to participate in the public affairs of the geopark. The cultivation of community social capital in the geopark cannot only promote the economic development of the community itself, but also help the operation of the rural democratic politics. It also can alleviate the problems of rural poverty, community resource allocation and so on. It is of great significance no matter from the perspective of the development of the community itself, or to promote community participation in the collective action of the geopark. However, because of the characteristics such as the multi dimension, multi multi-level and difficult measurement of social capital, how to apply the theory and combine with the practice operation is the important and difficult problem in the research.This research is guided by the geology, ecology, environmental ecology, ecological economics, sociology as well as the ecological environment coordination theory, externality theory and resources industrial economics, and adopts the literature review, analytical hierarchy process (AHP), expert opinion and scoring method, structural equation model (SEM) and Likertscale, GIS software, SPSS and AMOS software. Based on the theory of social capital, from the perspective of the development and protection of geopark from the community, the study is divided into four steps:Firstly, it clarifies the realistic and theoretical basis for community to participate in geopark:The realistic basis mainly includes the externality of current Geopark itself, the "market failures" phenomenons caused by public goods, and the "government failure" phenomenons caused by government-led development protection mode of f geoparks in China, which are the main reasons of problems emerged which include geopark reserve divisions are lack of scientificity and their management institutions are lack rationality and the radical development status and other issues;The theoretical basis mainly includes the inevitability and limitations of community participation and elaborate the theoretical linkage of social capital in the community to participate in public affairs of geopark from three aspects which include the consistency of community construction objectives, the uniformity of development and protection of the geopark and the theories support. The second step bases on the above analysis to build a dynamic mechanism of community participation model, which is a effective way to distinguish the geopark reserves reasonably of optimizing the allocation of resources, which is a external tension for community participation in public affairs of geopark; and the active and effective cultivation of social capital is inherent thrust of community involvement, and a reasonable division of reserves is a necessary condition and a guarantee for community participation.Through the analytic hierarchy process to establish a reserve division indicator model to guide scientific division of geopark reserves, while establish a assessment tool and hypotheses for geopark community social capital to verify its impact mechanisms. The third step, based on the theoretical analysis to make an empirical study on a case-Shennongjia world geological park. On the basis of the study area to conduct a comprehensive investigation, we will apply the reserve division indicator system to obtain a scientific geological division of reserves, and choose different levels of reserves which are located in different areas of the community, for the concept of model and research hypotheses to make a verification.Based on the results of empirical research, and combine with theoretical research results to make a further explanation. Finally, we combine the theoretical analysis and empirical results to put forward to measures relating to the system’s policy and management to further protection of the geopark community participation and social capital cultivation.The paper is divided into six chapters. The first chapter analyzes the theoretical background and realistic background, defines the main research content and structure arrangement, and explains the research method and technical route. The second chapter summarizes the literature review and research progress. The third chapter, on the basis of relevant research, summarizes the characteristics and development mode of geopark:the geopark is characterized by the externality and public resource, and the government-oriented mode is the main geopark development mode, and the characteristics and development mode are the reason why the division of existing geopark lacks the scientific objectivity, the management mechanism is not perfect and the development mode is radical and general. Under the condition of "government failure" and "market failure", the community involvement is introduced, and the involvement necessity is reflected in conforming with the geopark construction purpose, making up for the deficiency of government-oriented mode and community self-development; and the reason for the limitations of community involvement is the non-uniform allocation of resources and the lack of community capital, introducing the concept of social capital into the community involvement. And it explains the social capital theory in the geopark public affairs of community involvement from the community construction goal congruence, uniform development and protection of geopark and theoretical supportChapter 4:according to the realistic and theoretical analysis in the third chapter, it discusses the dynamic mechanism of community involvement. Chapter 5:on the basis of theoretical analysis, conduct the empirical research on Hubei Shennongjia World Geopark. Chapter 6:combined with the theoretical analysis and empirical results, make the policy recommendations for the effective community involvement in the geopark public affairs from the perspective of social capital, and explains the conclusions, outlook and shortcomings of this research.This paper takes the community involvement in geopark public affairs as a kind of typical collective activity, trying to explore whether the social basis influences and how to influence the collective activity; and it looks for the methods to cultivate and build the benign social capital that is beneficial to the development of community and geopark, providing theoretical basis for government to implement the community and geopark development policies. The possible innovations include:First, from the theoretical perspective, most research on geoparks in our country mainly focuses on the resource evaluation and tourism development, fewer about the community involvement, and they do not study the community involvement from the perspective of social capital under the background of geopark. This paper, from the sociological perspective, analyzes the problems of geoparks and limitations of community involvement, and analyzes the internal thrust force and external pulling force of community involvement from the theory of social capital, providing a new perspective for the current development of geopark and community involvement promotion.Second, from the practical perspective, there is few empirical research based on the social capital theory, and there is no research on the influencing mechanism of social capital under the background of geopark. This paper builds the social capital assessment tool under the background of geopark, and conducts the empirical research on the influencing mechanism of social capital on community involvement, and discusses the policy transformation, which has practical significance.