ABSTRACT
Local people around urban national parks, fraught with urban sprawl and other socio-economic pressures of urbanisation, such as land grabs for commercial and domestic uses, can threaten the integrity of respective parks. Unabated threats to community livelihoods can coerce resource-dependent communities around protected areas into developing negative perceptions and protracted harmful attitudes and practices towards parks. However, urban national parks have the potential to produce multiple benefits such as recreation, stress management and revenue generation from entrepreneurships inter alia ecotourism for city and rural dwellers. Ironically, there is a dearth of knowledge on local perception, attitudes and practices towards African urban national parks. This study explores the sustainable tourism development, with emphasis on its application to protected area management. Using a semi-structured questionnaire, the study focuses on environmental knowledge, perceptions, attitudes and practices among 82 randomly sampled households in the Shantumbu area abutting the Lusaka National Park (LNP) to ascertain people-park relations among the seemingly egalitarian Shantumbu community. The study analysed eight socio-economic variables in relation to the park elements by applying multiple logistic regression and several variables using frequentist approaches and chi-square tests. The results indicate that Shantumbu people’s ecotourism-related perceptions, attitudes and practices were influenced by several factors inter alia: level of education attained, gender, length of residency, marital status, occupation and number of livestock owned. The level of direct benefits from LNP had impacts on people’s perceptions, attitudes and practices. In order to sustain local support for biodiversity conservation and ecotourism as viable community livelihood strategies, various external factors impacting park management should be considered by state and non-state actors. Local integration into park management, including sustainable resource utilisation, can promote effective people-park relationships and help uphold local positive environmental values. Recommendations are that there should be strengthening of community involvement and elevated benefits from the park to ensure improved people-park relations, environmental and tourism sustainability.
