Abstract:

Peripheral areas are far away from the centre of population and economy, and at a disadvantage in the development of many fields. Many of these areas are characterized by lower agricultural income, less population, shortage of local investment and so on. Because of the fragile ecological environment and economic environment, later tourism developments and also easily affected by various factors from modernization, these areas have attracted domestic and foreign tourism researchers’ much attention in resent years. The article assumes that environmental identity significantly correlates to residents’ identity of tourism development in these areas, and it will influence attitudes to tourism impacts and residents’ support. This is of great importance to fragile environment in peripheral areas, and then it would facilitate the residents’ support for tourism to be a strong development momentum the tourism sustainable development. The study takes Lugu Lake as a typical case of tourism destination of peripheral areas. The methods of closed questionnaire and structured interview are adopted to collect information of residents’ environmental identity, attitudes of tourism impact and support. Subjects were those administrative villages or natural villages around the lake with developed tourism. Multistage sampling is adopted to select households and then respondents. Semantic differential scale consisted of seven bipolar statements were used to measure environmental recognition, responses range from 1 to 5. 1 represents agreement with one bipolar statement and 5 reflected agreement with the other extreme. And attitudes to tourism impacts and support were measured by 22 items asking residents their level of attitudes and support with specific forms of tourism development on a 1-5 Likert scaling where 1 represented ‘strongly disagree’ and 5 represented ‘strongly agree’. To detect scale dimensionality, an exploratory factor analysis with principal component method was conducted for each construct. And then stepwise multiple regression analysis was used to test the proposed model and hypothesized relationships. Results indicate that there is a direct negative relationship between environmental identity and residents’ attitudes towards the positive impacts of tourism, and a positive relationship between residents’ attitudes to the positive impacts of tourism and residents’ support for tourism, and a directly negative relationship between environmental identity and residents’ support for tourism. The main reason lies in the high environmental identity and residents’ stronger attitudes to the positive impacts of tourism. Findings confirm that residents’ environmental identity of these areas is relatively high, and residents remain relatively cautious on the development of tourism. The residents’ support for tourism also depends on the attitude of residents towards positive impact on tourism, instead of negative attitude. Residents’ attention on the positive impact of tourism on culture is slightly larger than the economic impact of tourism. Therefore, the tourism development of peripheral areas should avoid some issues such as environmental damage and excessive commercialization in the tourism development process of the central areas, and take environmental protection, shared interests, and overall planning as principles to achieve sustainable development of tourism.

Key words: peripheral areas, environmental identity, residents’ support for tourism, Lugu Lake Scenic Spot