Community Perspective On Sustainable Tourism In National Park

The development of sustainable tourism is a key point of every destination nowadays.Despite the fact that sustainability is a principal rule of all national parks,the great amount of them has just started this way.As new and unexperienced administrational units,national parks in China are also under the trend of sustainability advancement.However,in comparison with western national parks,one more issue appeared among C hinese national parks,the local communities pertinent to them.Since the residents are still living inside the protected area’s territory,the further conservation and sustainability development became a big question to think about,as the community residents are one of the most important stakeholder group in the development of national parks.Chinese researches previously discussed residents’ perceptions on tourism impacts from four aspects:economic,socio-cultural,environmental,and institutional dimension.This study adapts"The Prism of Sustainability" model,which includes these four dimensions as well as introduces the extension of it with residents’ satisfaction and residents’ support of tourism development in Chinese national parks.Taking the Shennongjia National Park and its four pertinent communities as a case,the structural equation model was used to test the proposed hypotheses as well as the relationship between four dimensions of sustainability,residents’ satisfaction towards tourism development and residents’ support.The mediating effect of residents’ satisfaction on residents’support was discussed and examined.The differences and influencing factors of tourism advancement are discussed.The results show that:the economic dimension has the most significant impact,what was followed by the institutional dimension.The mediating effect of satisfaction was verified in the cases of environmental and institutional dimensions.From the perspective of community characteristics,the dependence on tourism and the cultural difference were found to be important factors that can influence residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts.