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Abstract |
The demand for outdoor recreation has significantly increased over the last decade, and along with this the pressure on financial resources required to develop recreational infrastructure in nature areas. Fiscal and regulatory policies to generate the necessary funding are often neither ideologically nor legally accepted in countries where the right of public access applies, which is particularly broad in scope in the Nordics. Local stakeholders are thus reliant on voluntary contributions of visitors as one funding source (Sandell & Fredman, 2010). However, since these are often insufficient to cover the costs of infrastructure development, new strategies are called for to realise the benefits of trail-based recreation in the Nordics, without impeding the right to roam and the welfare of the natural environment (Sandell & Fredman, 2010). Soft policy approaches enhanced with insights from behavioural economics may offer such alternatives (Heldt, 2005). Recent research in this field provides strong arguments that consideration of social and psychological factors can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of soft policies (Avineri, 2012; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). Behavioural theories like the Norm Activation Model (Schwartz, 1977), Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 2012), and Conditional Cooperation (Frey & Meier, 2004) have thus increasingly been used to study different pro-social behaviours and to inform policies accordingly (Testa et al., 2018). Despite their success in various field, behaviourally informed policies are still rare in the management of nature areas. |
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