An assessment of a co-existing management model for tourism development in a national park

Abstract

Management of parks and protected areas has been witnessing a strategic transformation from centralised authorities to a decentralised management mode. In Asia, the new Vietnamese "Special-used Forests Policy" (announced in 2006) has moved park and protected area governance from being a stated-owned responsibility to a multi-component system, under which power is distributed amongst the public and private sectors. This co-existing management model is really a special form of concession. Though this unique management model has long been applied to management of national parks in Vietnam, knowledge on the two and/or more management bodies concurrently managing tourism and recreation services in the same park is scarce in existing academic literature. This research fills this void by studying the co-existing management model in a Vietnamese national park system. Planning, management, and governance are three important aspects that determine park management results. When studying the park management model through assessment, in order to understand what is going on in the field, it is important to recognise that all aspects may interact with each other. The researcher used a combined framework, based on the carrying capacity literature (Mitchell, 1995; Wilkinson, 1995), the Management Effectiveness Evaluation framework suggested by Hockings, Stolton, Leverington, Dudley, and Courrau (2006), as well as the good governance principles of UNDP (1997) and Institute on Governance (2002), to understand the "what", "how" and "why" questions of the new model. To study this new co-existing management model, an inductive qualitative approach with process evaluation and an embedded single case study research method was adopted. The Phong Nha- Ke Bang National Park in Vietnam, with its typical province-managed and unique World Heritage status, has been chosen for this case study. Before implementing the data collection, a pilot study has been operated in June, 2011 to select the units of analysis for the case study. The main data was collected in two phases, from July to September, 2012, and from February to April, 2013. The method to analyse the data was based on a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Finally, the researcher developed a theoretical model to explain the co-existing management model in a Vietnamese context. Accordingly, the researcher decided to conceptualise the central idea of the new model as, the co-existing management model: improvement via competition. The new model was found to assist Vietnamese park and protected area systems to ease the triplex-objective obstacles (recreation, conservation, and economy) and lack of government expertise. However, the non-sustainable development culture of Vietnam and the lack of coopetition amongst public and private sectors were found as two big issues that hinder the development of the new model. The application of the new model gives practical contributions to other park and protected area systems operating in similar contexts and relationships. However, analytical generalisation is required for this case.