Every household in Xidang village has two or three mules. Each morning when the tourists bus in, someone waits for their household's number to come up, at which point they pick up the next visitor in line to ride over the ridge to the secluded valley of Yubeng, most of whose restaurants have opened profitable guesthouses. Visits to Yubeng have soared in the past several years, as tourists seek out this serene place along a Tibetan pilgrimage route, and residents' incomes have risen in concert. Democratic village committee manages the rotation, and each year they use some of the income to send one person from each household on a pilgrimage to Lhasa. Over the years, organizations like The Nature Conservancy have assisted villagers in Xidang and Yubeng to install solar water heaters and biogas stoves to reduce fuelwood use. In fall 2008, The Nature Conservancy, the Management Bureau of the Meili Mountain National Scenic Area, and the Deqin County Environmental Bureau got the villagers together, working closely with the village committees, to manage the trash tourism brings into the valley. Most tourists come in small groups on foot, residents manage their activities, and most of the income they bring goes directly to residents. But the prefectural government plans to convert Meili Mountain Scenic Area into a "national park" with more centralized management of conservation and tourism. What will mean for residents--for their economic well-being and their autonomy and sense of ownership in a place of Tibetan sacred sites?
The villages around Pudacuo National Park used to have a similar system. People from Lawzong and other villages made ample incomes giving visitors horse rides around Bita Lake. But managers of the Bita Lake Nature Reserve noticed that water quality was worsening because of waste from horses and tourists. In 2005, the local government opted to transform the nature reserve into a "national park" with some areas designated for protection and others for carefully managed tourism. Increased tourism receipts would ensure better livelihoods for residents and better conservation of wildlife. Horse rides were prohibited. Now tourists come in on buses and walk on restricted routes, paying a very high entrance fee. People from nearby villages are supposed to be preferentially hired for the jobs the park creates, but they lack educational qualifications for most of these jobs, and anyway there are far fewer new jobs than residents. So the park provides each household with compensation drawn from ticket revenues. A tourism company manages labor and ticket receipts, while a park managment bureau is supposed to oversee conservation. However, after several years of wrangling, the Prefecture Government and People's Congress still have not issued a set of rules clarifying these organs' responsibilities. Why did the national park take this form in practice? How is it like or different from other nature attractions spreading across China?
Residents, governments, and conservationists face a lot of challenges as China's growth machine expands into remote areas. In northwestern Yunnan province, a frontier area where the Himalayan mountains curve southward and Chinese forces have historically met with other peoples and polities, tourism has become the main vehicle for economic growth. Conservationists have identified this as one of the world's richest hotspots of biodiversity, and they have worked for over a decade with local and provincial governments to improve nature protection rules and implementation. Promoting measures that allow residents to continue farming, pasturing livestock, and gathering fuel and nontimber products, conservationists have worked them to manage resource use. Tourism development is inseparable from conservation, as participants believe that only tourism can provide the funds necessary for conservation and offset lost opportunities for business and infrastructure development. So conservationists pulled out Category II: "national park" from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which denotes a "protected area[s] managed mainly for ecosystem protection and recreation." Providing financial and technical assistance, conservation organizations, particularly The Nature Conservancy, have worked extensively with people from government organs, academic institutions, tourism enterprises, and resident communities, to realize this development-via-conservation model. But conservation organization staff readily admit that their power to influence on-the-ground outcomes is limited: now struggles over how conservation and tourism will be managed and how the benefits will be distributed are playing out among local actors at several levels.
My dissertation research is about how tourism contributes to biodiversity conservation and development in China's protected areas. Across China governments, activists, entrepreneurs, and residents are trying different ways of making conservation and development work together, and tourism is central to a lot of these projects. This is especially so in nature reserves and scenic areas where China's most spectacular scenery and its remnant wildlife exist alongside marginal farmland and sparse opportunities for industrial development. In the past two decades rural areas across the country have built infrastructure and attractions to entice tourists, mainly Chinese city-dwellers who are leaving their homes in ever greater numbers in search of natural scenery and novel experiences. Tourism is supposed to be a 'non-consumptive' industry that doesn't harm natural resources and whose revenues promote active conservation. At the same time, promoters of ecotourism emphasize its capacity to enhance the livelihoods of low-income residents. In my dissertation, I ask
I spent the summers of 2008, 2009, and 2011, and 10 months of 2010 in China doing fieldwork. To understand the background and operation of nature reserves and other protected areas, I interviewed people involved in protected area policy and management. These included government officials, staff of conservation advocacy organizations, tourism entrepreneurs, attraction planners, protected area field staff. I also collected relevant documents.
To get a clear idea from residents' perspective on the national parks, I spent several months living in villages in Meili Snow Mountain National Park and Pudacuo National Park in northwest Yunnan. I interviewed residents and observed what was going on in tourism, farming, and forest resource use. In 2011, collaborators from Southwest Forestry University joined me in conducting a questionnaire survey of residents in five communities in national parks. We asked about various income-earning activities to learn how residents of villages differently affected by national park tourism differ in the ways they allocate labor to make a living.
Finally, in order to get a broader view, in 2011, I went beyond northwest Yunnan to seven protected areas across southwest China to gather information on how their tourism and conservation activities are managed and how these management models came together over time.
I am looking at these issues from a number of perspecctives. I take an organizational approach to the different constituencies shaping protected areas, examining how different organizations work internally and externally engage other constituencies in promoting their visions of conservation and tourism development. To understand patterns in how local elites organize tourism development, I am borrowing from work on urban growth machines which is surprisingly relevant in these places, despite their rural locations and lack of full markets in land. My broader examination of protected areas draws from this line of thought and from research on institutional diffusion. With respect to rural residents, I started with qualitative observations to understand how residents understand protected areas. I am interested in how residents perceive the legitimacy of conservation and tourism management bodies, as well as the deal in which benefits from tourism are supposed to secure their cooperation with conservation rules. In addition, to address directly questions of how tourism and conservation affect livelihoods, I conducted a questionnaire survey on labor allocation and income to get concrete data about livelihood activities to complement qualitative treatment of interviews and observations.
My research looks at projects of development-via-conservation to understand the political, economic, and ecological factors that help and hinder these projects' proponents in achieving their goals. This is a particularly important issue in China for several reasons. First, China's breakneck growth is putting stress on both social and ecological communities in intense and perhaps irreversible ways. Identifying which development and conservation strategies work for which objectives is key to mitigating their abrasive effects. Second, China is in many ways an outlier in studies of conservation because of its unique system of government and form of economic growth. As a result, fairly little social science research has been conducted on conservation in China, and findings from other countries may not be applicable there. My work will advance theory on conservation and development as well as make practical contributions to developing holistically appropriate conservation strategies.
updated 9 August 2011