Developing Representations of User Pays Strategies in Nature-Based Tourism Settings

Content analysis of The Cairns Post and The Australian newspapers was undertaken to generate key ideas and themes on the issue of ‘user pays’ strategies. All articles referring to the strategy of user pays were selected to provide a sample of articles. Summary statistics indicated that most articles referred to tourism, presented the strategy with a negative approach, and were written from the government perspective. Priority issues that became apparent from the content analysis were: user charges, equity, environmental management, funding and taxes. These issues and other concepts relating to user pays strategies were presented to students in order to elicit word associations used to develop a similarity matrix. The similarity matrix was used to develop the social representations of user pays strategies in a multidimensional scaling model. User pays was found to be represented as a management technique for enabling effective use of natural resources. It was seen as a provider of funding for natural tourism resources and determined to have a closer relationship with tourism and host communities than other forms of charges, when they are applied in natural tourism settings.