Negotiating tourism-biodiversity relations in the Anthropocene: a practice-based study of protected areas

Tourism-biodiversity relations are widely promoted within sustainability agendas, yet biodiversity loss continues to intensify under Anthropocene conditions. Rather than treating tourism only as a management problem or conservation solution, this study examines how tourism-biodiversity relations are negotiated through everyday practice in protected areas. Combining bibliometric mapping with multi-sited qualitative fieldwork and 45 semi-structured interviews in four protected areas in Vietnam, the study shows that tourism functions as a visible but uneven interface for conservation. Biodiversity is often encountered through rules, infrastructure, silence, restraint, altered animal behaviour, and routine frontline work rather than through explicit ecological understanding alone. The findings identify four relational patterns showing how responsibility is distributed unevenly across tourists, guides, operators, rangers, and local communities. The paper contributes a practice-based account of tourism-biodiversity relations that clarifies both the possibilities and limits of tourism as a response to biodiversity loss.