| Widespread conflicts between protected areas and the people who live within their immediate vicinities suggest significant shortcomings in the philosophies governing the strategies employed by parks for interacting with their neighbors. This research posits that these conflicts are due in large part to an inadequate theoretical understanding of the decision-making processes of the people living in these regions. Empirical research was carried out within local populations surrounding three national parks, Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, USA, Virgin Islands National Park, St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Podocarpus National Park, Loja and Zamora-Chinchipe, Ecuador, to improve conceptions of these processes.; Both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses were undertaken to explore the relative importance of different forms of evaluations undertaken by local residents and the patterns and processes that influenced them most. Drawing upon 420 scripted interviews with local residents, ninety-five interviews with park officials and members of affiliated organizations, and participant observation techniques, the research examined the significance of local residents' environmental values and their assessments of the benefits and disadvantages of park presence, of park managers' receptiveness to local input, of alternatives to park exploitation, of the attitudes of their peers, and of the trustworthiness of park managers in determining local responses to each park. The responses ranged from active support to active opposition. By conducting this research in extremely diverse contexts and accounting for key social, economic, political, historical, and environmental factors, the research has revealed important lessons about the conditions under which certain types of management and outreach are more or less likely to influence different types of responses from local populations.; The study reveals that long-held assumptions about the primary importance of purely rational assessments in formulating local reactions to parks are incomplete. The most consistent predictors of active responses toward the three parks were local assessments of the trustworthiness of park managers, which were most powerfully influenced by non-rational factors. Detailed analyses explore the reasons for these findings and the key elements that tended to build and destroy trust in each setting. |
