Exploring the relationship between rural resident empowerment in nature tourism and perceptions of conservation justice.

Tourism arguably grounds for reciprocal relationships between the local communities and nature conservation. Tourism scholars deployed numerous theoretical remedies to examine the tourism and nature conservation relationship. Yet, studies rarely accentuate a socio-psychological view to elucidating how tourism can help mitigate place-based conservation injustices. Indeed, residents’ empowerment from tourism can provide valuable insights into how tourism mechanisms build foundations to mitigate local conservation conflicts in rural communities. Furthermore, we still do not understand how such empowerment translates into other domains of everyday life in rural communities. Thus, in this project, we extend the theory of empowerment in tourism by providing a better understanding of the importance of empowering tourism benefits for resident perceptions of conservation justice in nature-based tourism destinations. First, we show that tourism can directly contribute to nature conservation by influencing resident perceptions of justice in large-scale conservation programs like the European Ecological Network Natura 2000. Secondly, this is the first study to empirically examine the relationship between resident empowering benefits from rural nature tourism and sense of justice in international conservation programs like Natura 2000, and empirically test the effects of empowerment in tourism into nature conservation attitudes