The relationship between visitors’ environmental values and the perception of nature restrictions in a Swedish nature reserve

Environmental orientations have been shown to have a crucial impact on how individuals perceive and behave in nature. So far, research has primarily focused on environmental attitudes, neglecting to fully explore the wide spectrum of environmental values in visitors of nature based tourism destinations. Gaining a deep understanding of visitors’ environmental values and their role in shaping perceptions is, however, crucial for designing a sustainable transformative tourist experience. Through applying the Two Major Environmental Valuescale, this work holistically explores the environmental values of visitors at a turquoise coloured lake in a Nature reserve in Jämtland, Sweden. The case study area has gained massive popularity over the past few years and high visitor numbers have had a detrimental impact on the local ecology. Increasingly severe restrictions have been introduced to the area to minimise tourists’ environmental impact and protect nature. How visitors with different environmental values perceive these current and potential future restrictions is explored in this work. Interestingly, results show significant differences in how individuals with varying environmental values perceive restrictions to protect the natural environment. Visitors with biocentric values tend to have the most positive perception of restrictions, anthropocentric minded individuals the most negative. A newly identified third visitor group, whose perception of nature restrictions is found to be located in between biocentric and anthropocentric individuals, is characterised as having dualcentric environmental values. Implications for how management should work towards creating transformative tourist experiences based on visitors environmental values are being discussed along with an agenda for future research.2022-01-22