Tourism industry political playbook in public protected areas

The context of this analysis is that the tourism industry profits from public protected areas, and deploys a suite of political strategies to gain greater opportunities and control. A few tourism enterprises contribute significantly to conservation of threatened species, but these represent <0.01% of the sector worldwide. Most tourism enterprises aim only for profit, at the expense of biodiversity and environment, recreational park visitors and other taxpayers, and commercial competitors. Our aim here is to identify the main components of tourism industry political playbooks, used to promote expansion into public protected areas. We use interpretive thematic analysis of the lifetime experiences of park managers, tour guides, and recreation researchers, including historical documents and events. We find that tourism industry interests: run lobbying campaigns misrepresenting public protected areas as tourism assets; lobby for private tourism developments in national parks; adopt green-washing and social-washing to gain social licence; misuse ecotourism terminology and ecocertification functions; promote approaches based on individual responsibilities in order to conceal institutional changes; misrepresent conservation tourism as if it reflected the entire sector; promote privatisation of parks visitor services; gradually extend the rights associated with park tourism permits; lobby politically for land grabs; and infiltrate tourism interests into conservation organisations. We conclude that at global scale, contributions of tourism to conservation are overshadowed by threats to biodiversity from these political mechanisms, and especially from private tourism property developments inside public protected areas. We invite case studies of such developments, so future research can quantify how the playbook is deployed.