Nature Sports


Book Description

This book represents the first international collection that challenges current thinking and research in the emerging field of nature sport. Owing to its inherent connections with fields such as business, leisure, health, tourism, and education, this emerging field has attracted perspectives from a wide range of theoretical viewpoints – much of which are discussed within this collection. In simple terms nature sports refer to a group of sporting activities that predominantly take place in natural and rural areas. Participation can be both competitive and recreational, with the primary aim to work in relation to nature, where participants seek harmony rather than the quest to conquer it. Within this book, experts from around the globe consider the very essence of nature sport(s), including numerous practical examples of it in action, offering invaluable insights to those both familiar and new to the field. Driven by an increase in non-traditional sports, coupled with growing concerns about the environment, nature sports have experienced significant expansion and interest in both participation and academic debate. This book is a valuable resource for students and academics in fields such as alternative sports, alternative sport subcultures, sport philosophy, sport and social issues, ethics, and phenomenology. It is also a fascinating read for outdoor educators and practitioners. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issues in Annals of Leisure Research.




Tourism Interventions


Book Description

This book brings together in one volume, the various types of interventions that can steer tourism towards positive impacts (and/or prevent negative impacts) on the destinations where tourism is taking place. Interventions in tourism studies have been viewed primarily as ‘public interventions’ and mainly in the sphere of public policies, planning, and development. This book, however, adopts a larger viewpoint by considering the concept of intervention in areas other than the public sector. The purpose, therefore, is to look into different meanings and uses of the notion of intervention which might involve the initiatives of a variety of actors or agents across locales, borders or scales, as well as how the impacts of tourism on a place have been dealt with. To this end, the book examines tourism interventions and their role in making or breaking places, as initiated and implemented by a variety of stakeholders (public/private sector, NGOs and local communities), by exploring the realities of tourism interventions and how they are utilized to alleviate the negative impacts of tourism; innovative and successful interventions that have contributed to tourism’s making of places; and the way in which certain interventions have not been particularly successful or ‘failing forward’. This significant volume moves beyond considerations of ‘just’ policy or ‘just’ marketing, and brings together different forms of action or inaction in one category, which is a useful response to the variety of actors and initiatives in the tourism space. This book provides students, researchers, and academics with new insight and understanding of how best to sustainably develop, promote, and manage tourism, and how to help destinations become more resilient in the face of future crises.