Empirical application to forest recreation in South West France

Managing outdoor recreation requires close coordination between stakeholders. It is made all the more complicated by the fact that the majority of stakeholders involved hardly know each other. In this respect, a better integration of the visitors into the management process calls for a fundamental change in the way conceptual and practical models are designed. To this end, we propose an original analytical framework, inspired by the fields of economics and geography, and based on various definitions of proximity.Our previous research on forest recreation uses in South West France has shown that many organizations dedicated to regulate uses conflicts in the selected areas have failed because they gave little (if not) consideration to visitor’s perspective (e.g. the “demand side”). To gain a clearer understanding of how these users could be included in the management schemes, we ran several surveys that bring together both quantitative and qualitative techniques (500 & 60 obs. resp.).We distinguish three forms of proximity (geographic, organizational, and institutional) which are scale-dependent. In contrast with the preferences expressed at larger scales, the preferences expressed by people that live in the vicinity of a forest tend to focus on more specific details, such as the sensitive and aesthetic values purveyed by certain pine trees, contact with fauna, and open and varied underbrush depending on the season. Such values are coupled with dedicated (not necessarily intensive) practices. Though our work is still at an explanatory stage we believe that coupling the above-mentioned definitions of proximity may greatly improve the analysis of the territorial dimensions of outdoor recreation management