NS34 Session 13

 

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Title: Outdoor recreation and tourism in a changing world: Challenges of the Anthropocene 

Organisers: Kate Dashper, Tobias Heldt, Gabriella Torell Palmquist, Peter Carlman, and Jason King

Affiliation: Leeds Beckett University, Dalarna University, Karlstad University

 

Description

The Anthropocene is a term used to refer to the current time period where humans have become the single most influential species on the planet, causing significant changes to land, water, environment, other species and the atmosphere. Outdoor recreation and tourism, including activities ranging from walking, hiking and climbing, to paddling, cycling and horse riding amongst others, occur within, through and as part of the natural environment which is shifting in the Anthropocene. This session invites papers that explore some of the intersections between outdoor recreation and tourism and the natural environment. Contributions may reflect on how ecological transitions and climate change, as well as the social, economic, cultural and political impacts that accompany these changes, are impacting and are impacted by outdoor recreation and tourism practices. How does this affect tourists’ sense of belonging to the places and spaces in which outdoor recreation occurs? Does this impact participants’ connection to nature and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours? How does this affect the funding of recreational infrastructure? What are possible consequences for governance and management of outdoor recreational areas? What does a changing natural world mean for the sustainability and future of outdoor recreation and tourism? 

 

Abstracts

Title: Interpreting Nature as Resource: Insights from Nature-Based Tourism Firms
Authors: Preston Leino, University of Eastern Finland, Henna Konu, and Esko Sorakunnas

Nature-based tourism (NBT) fundamentally depends on natural resources (Fossgard & Stensland, 2021) and ecosystem services (Margaryan et al., 2022). In the Anthropocene, this dependence is becoming increasingly visible for NBT. Especially cultural ecosystem services, such as scenic landscapes, recreational and spiritually meaningful encounters in nature, strongly influence visitor satisfaction and shape overall tourism experiences (Margaryan et al., 2022), while also being highly sensitive to human actions.

This study explores the role of natural resources and ecosystem services through a holistic resource-based theory framework, including the natural resource-based view (Clark et al., 2026). Our focus is on how tourism companies identify, interpret, and utilize these resources. Particular attention is paid to the narratives through which tourism providers make sense of their relationships with natural resources, ecosystem services, and related stakeholders.

Empirical data consist of 25 semi-structured interviews with NBT firms operating in two UNESCO Biosphere Reserves in Finland. The findings highlight natural resources and ecosystem services as crucial resources for business. For these firms, high-quality natural resources are essential for creating meaningful tourism experiences and are the primary reason for operating in these locations. The results further demonstrate that experiential value creation is closely intertwined with the sustained quality of natural resources and ecosystem services, which is critical not only for delivering high-quality tourism experiences but also for long-term business continuity in nature-based tourism.

Keywords: Nature-based tourism, Small tourism firms, Natural resources, Ecosystem services

References

Clark, C., Matarrita-Cascante, D., Tkatch, J. R. V., & Fariha, M. S. (2026). Examining the competitive advantage of nature-based destinations: Applying a holistic resource-based theory framework. Tourism Management, 112, 105281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2025.105281

Fossgard, K., & Stensland, S. (2021). Broadening the scope of resources in nature: An explorative study of nature-based tourism firms. Journal of Ecotourism, 20(1), 35–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/14724049.2020.1751650

Margaryan, L., Prince, S., Ioannides, D., & Röslmaier, M. (2022). Dancing with cranes: A humanist perspective on cultural ecosystem services of wetlands. Tourism Geographies, 24(4–5), 501–522. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2018.1522512

 

Title: Compliance to Pay for Groomed Cross-Country Skiing Trails: An Actor-Network Theory Approach
Authors: Ioanna Farsari, School for Culture and Society, CeTLeR, Dalarna University, Jana Brehmer, and Tobias Heldt

Recreational trails are often located in nature environments. In the Nordic countries, the Right of Public Access (Allemansrätten) allows people to freely and respectfully access nature, even on private land. This creates a legal grey zone for trail pass systems indented to fund the development and maintenance of commercial recreational trails through user fees. Research in compliance has investigated mostly behavioural models and purchase decision-making theories, willingness to pay, or social expectations. In this research, we take a socio-material semiotic perspective to understand how compliance is constructed.

We employ Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to understand how visitors navigate the grey zone between purchasing trail passes and exercising the right of public access. In our research we focus on ‘translation’ as the process of how compliance is negotiated and constructed in both social and material forms. Understanding these negotiations reveals how ordering and stabilisation occur, and thus how compliance emerges.

We analysed 17 interviews with users of groomed cross-country skiing trails at Kläppen and Orsa Grönklitt in Dalarna, Sweden. Our findings show that compliance, in ANT terms, is not merely obedience with rules following signs and using QR codes. It is not only management efforts e.g. to make payments visible, or feelings of guilt and embarrassment that shape compliance. Compliance occurs when a heterogeneous network— comprising snow, grooming machinery, digital tools, spatial arrangements, organizations, signs, facilities etc—successfully orders together.

Although users often view groomed trails as a service worth paying for, our study showed that it is not just that. Nature itself acts as an influential actant, not though as questioning the trail pass system. Nature shapes users’ experiences and their negotiations around payment. Compliance emerges within a hybrid socio-material network in which roles are continually negotiated.

 

Title: Hiking Infrastructure Changes as a Management Measure to Steer Recreational Use in Protected Areas with Important Wildlife Habitats
Authors: Saumya Rathnayake, The Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Øystein Aas, and Vegard Gundersen

Growing recreational use in European mountains, and associated infrastructure development such as roads, trails, and tourist cabins has created significant challenges for vulnerable wildlife species. In response, national park authorities implement a range of visitor management measures aimed at influencing recreational use in specific wildlife habitats. These measures can be implemented within a broader management measures pyramid, which ranges from soft preventive and information intervention to more direct regulatory and legal measures.

Our study explores how recreationists perceive and act towards such infrastructure-related management measures through examining their behaviors and attitudes broadly. Guided by the COM-B model as the theoretical framework for the study, semi structured interviews and field observations was developed to examine how visitors’ capability, opportunity, and motivation shape their behaviors through their perceptions, and how they response to management measures while engaging in outdoor recreation in intended landscapes. We choose the geographical areas for the data collection intentionally, three Norwegian national parks where outdoor recreation overlaps with vulnerable wildlife habitats, which include Dovrefjell Sunndalsfjella national park: musk ox and Wild reindeer range, Rondane (sør) national park: wild reindeer area, and Femundsmarka national park: which contains sensitive wetland bird habitats.

The findings from the study provide insight into how infrastructure-based management measures influence visitor behaviors, and through the COM B framework help explain why such measures effective, less effective or misunderstood in different recreational contexts. The study contributes practical knowledge for policy makers, government authorities, and protected area managers seeking to balance visitor experiences with wildlife conservation in sensitive wildlife areas.

Keywords: Visitor management, COM-B Model, wildlife, management measures, outdoor recreation

 

Title: Rethinking Places for Sport in the Anthropocene
Authors: Peter Carlman, Department of Educational Studies, Karlstad University, and Gabriella Torell Palmquist

Anthropogenic climate change has profound effects globally. If the Anthropocene signifies the decline of nature as we once knew it, how might this transformation affect sporting activities conducted natural environments? This presentation emphasizes that the challenges of the Anthropocene extend beyond large-scale environmental issues; they are also intricately connected to everyday life and cultural practices. We adhere to the idea that climate is as much embedded in memory, behaviour, text, and identity as it is in meteorological measurements. This scenario necessitates a renegotiation not only of the future of sports but also of humanity’s shared history and the individual emotions and identities associated with sports. Ultimately, changes in nature due to climate change shape sports culture and redefine the understanding of the role sports mean to us. Drawing on a sociological and cultural–geographical perspective on place and belonging, this presentation focuses on how an approach centred on the relationship between the physical environment, symbolic representation, and human emotions can offer new insights into sports in the Anthropocene.

 

Title: Hooves on Shifting Ground: Sustainability Transitions at Landsmót
Authors: Áskell Heiðar Ásgeirsson, University of Iceland at Hólar, Laufey Haraldsdóttir, Ingibjörg Sigurðardóttir, and Sigríður Rósa Bjarnadóttir

“Landsmót,” the national championship of the Icelandic horse, is Iceland’s largest outdoor sporting event. The 26th of this kind will be held at Hólar in Hjaltadalur from 5–11 July 2026. The week-long event attracts approximately 7,000–8,000 attendees and around 1,000 horses, and relies on the contributions of over 100 volunteers alongside more than 200 staff.

The event industry is increasingly required to address sustainability imperatives in the face of accelerating environmental change. Equestrian events such as Landsmót are embedded in and dependent on dynamic natural environments, while also generating impacts at both local and broader scales. In this context, such events can be understood as sites of sustainability transition, with the potential to serve as best-practice models for environmental management, impact mitigation, and climate adaptation.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and preliminary findings of research conducted at Landsmót. The event is approached as a living research setting to assess the real-world environmental impacts of a large-scale event and to test sustainable solutions in practice. It also examines which aspects of event planning and management are most critical for advancing the sustainable development of equestrian events.

Finally, both quantitative and qualitative studies are conducted during and after the event to explore visitors’ and residents’ attitudes toward the sustainable development of equestrian events such as Landsmót.

 

Title: Negotiating Everyone's Rights in Shared Landscapes
Author: Minna Nousiainen, University of Lapland

This paper is based on my ongoing PhD research, which examines how everyone’s rights (jokaisenoikeudet in Finnish), or the right of public access, are negotiated within changing socio-ecological relations. In this research, everyone’s rights are approached as ongoing, situational negotiation shaped by mobility practices and encounters in shared landscapes.

Everyone’s rights are often understood as a cornerstone of sustainable outdoor recreation and a resource for nature-based activities, including tourism. However, changes in land use, growing visitor numbers in natural areas and shifting ecological conditions increasingly challenge the prevailing assumptions about the right of public access. These changes encourage a reconsideration of collective understanding of what is shared, by whom and under what conditions.

The paper explores relations in landscapes where access is formally open, but increasingly influenced by ecological change, socio-cultural norms and practices of formal and informal spatial guidance. Empirically, the paper focuses on Nordic cross-country skiing. Skiing on tracks offers a lens for understanding everyone’s rights as commoning—the practice through which shared access is produced, maintained and negotiated—showing how access in winter landscapes is enacted or limited.

Drawing on experiences from Finnish Lapland, the paper aims to illustrate how declining snow reliability, management and governance of landscapes and related infrastructure as well as local socio-cultural norms and tacit knowledge are reflected in practicing everyone’s rights.

 

Title: Nature First, People First, or Something in Between? Exploring the Complexities of Balancing Nature Protection and Public Access/Recreation on Nature Reserves
Authors: Kate Dashper, Leeds Beckett University, Adele Doran, and Jason King

“We’re in a nature crisis, everyone knows that.” These were the words of a site manager of a nature reserve at a workshop focused on balancing nature conservation, public access and recreation. For this individual, and many of the other site managers present, the need to foreground nature conservation above all other social and economic factors (e.g., public access, local business development) was self-evident and indisputable.

However, this is not the only crisis facing western societies. Widening inequalities, obesity, poor physical and mental health outcomes, and low levels of physical activity are prevalent, particularly amongst some ethnic minority communities, and for groups with low socioeconomic status. Government, councils, and health, social and community groups encourage people to get active in green spaces. Often, these spaces are also ecologically vulnerable, and recreation and tourism activities may conflict with nature recovery priorities.

In this paper, we draw on a two-year study exploring some of the complexities of balancing nature protection and public access/recreation on protected natural sites. We consider questions of land ownership, power, rights and responsibilities, and social justice that underpin intersecting nature and social crises, as well as opportunities for solidarity across environmental and social causes.

 

Title: Forests and Firewood, the Anthropocene and Protected Areas
Author: Chris E. Hurst, Northumbria University

Across the Nordic region, nature is protected via a system of national parks, sanctuaries, public lands, and reserves. Access to nature for human well-being and enjoyment is also culturally embedded, as seen in the Norwegian concept of Friluftsliv (“open-air-life”), and even enshrined into law as in the case of Finland’s Jokamiehenoikeudet and Sweden’s Allemansrätten (Visit Finland, 2026; Visit Norway, 2026; Visit Sweden, 2026). In Canada, nature protection involves a complex system of parks, reserves, sanctuaries, and wildlife areas. Concomitantly places of outdoor recreation, tourism, conservation, and more-than-human entanglement, protected areas are managed by federal and provincial authorities and are culturally linked to national imaginaries of northern-ness (Hurst & Stinson 2023; Morton Turner, 2002).

This paper examines human-firewood relations in two Canadian protected areas. Specifically, the paper attends to the material-affective tensions that emerge among anthropogenic resource extraction, competing park management objectives, conservation activities, acute wildfire seasons, and more-than-human recreation. For embedded within the alluring scents and sounds of a crackling campfire are also acrid smells of burning non-organic materials and distant out-of-control wildfires. Within the smoke, shelterwood logging practices and ‘prescribed burns’ (designed with the specific intent to emulate post-fire ecological regeneration and reduce the risk of actual wildfires) likewise intervene to ignite, control, and suppress different and unexpected nature transformations in the Anthropocene. Among forests and firewood, I suggest, are opportunities to kindle care with the more-than-human places we recreate, and with an Anthropocene that is both cause and effect of transformation in protected areas and beyond.

References

Hurst, C.E., & Stinson, M.J. (2023). Inviting engagement with atmospheres. In O. Rantala, V. Kinnunen, & E. Höckert (Eds.) Researching with Proximity: Relational Methodologies for the Anthropocene (pp. 165-187). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39500-0_11

Morton Turner, J. (2002). From woodcraft to ‘Leave No Trace’: Wilderness, consumerism, and environmentalism in twentieth-century America. Environmental History, 7(3), 462-482. https://doi.org/10.2307/3985918

Visit Finland. (2026, April 10). Finnish everyman's rights – the right to roam & enjoy nature. https://www.visitfinland.com/en/articles/finnish-everyman-rights-the-right-to-roam/

Visit Norway. (2026, April 10). Friluftsliv. https://www.visitnorway.com/things-to-do/outdoor-activities/friluftsliv/

Visit Sweden. (2026, April 10). The Right of Public Access – Swedish freedom to roam. https://visitsweden.com/what-to-do/nature-outdoors/nature/sustainable-and-rural-tourism/the-right-of-public-access/