Competing narratives and the politics of tourism restriction in the 1000 visitor per day quota policy in Komodo National Park

The 1000-visitor-per-day restriction policy in Komodo National Park (Indonesia) represents a contested form of environmental governance shaped by competing ecological and socioeconomic interests. Despite its policy relevance, public responses and stakeholder perspectives surrounding the policy remain underexplored. This study examines public sentiment and stakeholder perspectives using a qualitative multi-source approach based on 264 Facebook comments, 69 online news articles, policy documents, and nine semi-structured interviews. Facebook comments were manually classified into four sentiment categories to assess public responses to the policy, while online news articles, interview transcripts, and policy documents were analyzed thematically using NVivo 15 software. Findings reveal divergent public responses and stakeholder perspectives, with conservation-oriented narratives emphasizing ecosystem protection and socioeconomic narratives highlighting livelihood impacts, economic uncertainty, and distributive concerns among tourism-dependent communities. The findings further indicate that the policy influences regional tourism dynamics by redistributing visitor flows toward surrounding destinations, particularly Labuan Bajo. The study demonstrates that visitor-restriction policies can become arenas of governance contestation, shaping tourism systems and stakeholder relations. It contributes to the literature on environmental governance and tourism management by highlighting the socio-political tensions embedded in restrictive tourism policies and the importance of inclusive governance approaches in protected areas.