Each of us have place we are attached to. Places we keep with us, sometimes far away in distance but tucked away in a cosy recess in the back of the mind; sometimes right on our doorstep and easily accessed. We form a bond with these places, be it that they bring back happy memories of times gone by, or that we have built a community connection over time. We foster a sense of belonging, one that grows through interactions with the place itself and social interactions that occur there, be it through the daily activities of a resident or the recreational and social experience of a tourist. This is ‘place attachment’, and place attachment theory posits that where people have an emotional bond with a place, it can generate positive behaviour to protect it, such as pro-environmental behaviour (PEB). But we wanted to quantify the effect and discover why it is not uniform, why some studies have found place attachment to have no – or even a negative – effect. We conducted a study that found that while place attachment does have a broadly positive effect on people’s PEB, cultural and individual factors affect how great this is. One factor appears to be counterintuitive: that where residents and tourists (from the same country, not international visitors with potentially different inherent cultures) are equally attached to a place, it is the tourists who will behave in a move proenvironment manner. Previous research has shown that tourists are less likely to be environmentally friendly through their indulgent activities, but their PEB is more complex. Tourists’ attachments are very often related to how a destination can serve their recreational purposes – they are on holiday to have fun, a good time, and anything that can improve that, such as caring for and improving the environment, boosts that experience. Activities such as trail hiking, rock climbing and museum visits can contribute to the development of an attachment to the place, and tourists are more likely to behave in environmentally friendly ways when this leads to better experiences. Tourists can anticipate a feeling of future nostalgia froma holiday – most of us will have memories of vacations from years and decades gone by, from childhood to adulthood – and they do not want those memories tainted by a damaged or polluted environment. Tourists and residents develop their sense of attachment in different ways, and thus their motives for behaving pro-environmentally differ. 12 |
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