An empirical assessment of stakeholders' understanding of sustainable tourism in the alpine protected areas

Sustainable tourism has been widely viewed as an effective way of addressing the socio-economic and environmental issues associated with protected areas, particularly alpine protected areas which are popular destinations providing opportunities for adventure tourism with close-to-nature experiences. Nevertheless, the impact of tourism is controversial and its sustainability is not always evident both in terms of socio-economic development and nature conservation. This paper assesses the level of understanding of multiple stakeholders about sustainable tourism in the Central Karakoram National Park (CKNP), located in Pakistan's peripheral province of Gilgit-Baltistan, where nature tourism is considered to be the most promising activity to overcome livelihood and conservation problems. Data were collected from four stakeholder groups using a previously structured survey instrument about their level of understanding of sustainable tourism and semi-structured interviews about the barriers to achieving sustainable tourism. The findings disclosed that, although stakeholders had a moderately high level of understanding of sustainable tourism, the main obstacles and challenges that underpinned sustainable tourism development in CKNP were strong fragmentation between public and private entities, absence of a participatory governance structure, and a lack of tourism management plan for CKNP's potential future as a destination of sustainable tourism. Implications are discussed for building a more integrated policy approach to sustainable tourism development in protected areas