The significance of risk is growing in many Western societies, a phenomenon linked to increasing individualism, personal choice, and outcome uncertainty in multiple spheres of life. Despite being healthier and more physically protected from harm than any previous society, a serious concern for safety and risk control is emerging as a defining characteristic of modern social life. Within the context of a risk-averse society, this thesis investigates the nature and relevance of risk in natural resource recreation and tourism settings. Millions of people every day visit national parks and other protected areas around the world in which natural hazards inhere. Many visitors fail to recognise these hazards, creating moral, legal, and ethical issues for natural resource managers. People travel to national parks anticipating a degree of adventure, to escape routines, and to witness the grandeur of nature. Ironically, the very qualities that attract people to natural areas may also put them at risk. Managers of natural resource tourism and recreation areas in New Zealand are confronted with a paradox born out of visitor demand for nature experiences, a legal obligation to facilitate free access, and a growing social emphasis on health and safety. In particular, this study assesses the risk perceptions of visitors to the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers, popular tourist attractions on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island, and explores the risk perceptions and beliefs of resource management agency staff. The study also investigates the issue of risk communication at these two sites, and the degree to which existing hazard messages are successful at encouraging appropriate visitor behaviour. Pictorial hazard warning signs are introduced to the sites and their effectiveness evaluated. The findings show that many visitors (especially international visitors) have relatively poor awareness of natural hazards, and behave in ways which potentially compromise physical safety. It is argued that perceptions and behaviour are a consequence of diverse individual and situational factors including limited knowledge of the sites, beliefs about management, poor comprehension of hazard warning signs, and freedom from the normative constraints of everyday life. In contrast to visitors, managers at the glacier sites consider the risks to be significant, and, potentially, severe. It is argued that managers' perceptions of risk are influenced by several important social and site-specific factors, including their own experiences of hazards at the glaciers, perceived legal and moral obligations, the organisational culture, and impressions of high societal expectation concerning safety. The situation is further complicated by the freedom of access principle in national parks, and increasing tourist demand for nature-based experiences. These factors governed beliefs about the subject of risk. This study identifies several dimensions of risk in nature-based recreation and tourism settings. Visitors are at risk of personal accident or injury at certain tourism attractions. Awareness of hazards is limited, visitor behaviour compromises safety, and existing communication strategies are only partially effective. Risk is also apparent in the agency responsible for management of outdoor recreation areas. Site managers perceive a risk in their failure to prevent visitors from harm, whereas senior managers identify risk as primarily financial, legal, and political. Collectively, these factors demonstrate that the phenomenon of risk is increasingly important in the tourism and recreation context, and has the potential to influence significantly both management and experience of protected natural areas in New Zealand.

This thesis examines the proposition that the local population at a tourist destination copy the economic behaviour of tourists and learn to give economic value to the same objects and activities that are demonstrated by tourists. Levuka, the old capital of Fiji, served as the case study. It was found that decisions are based on the experiences and the cultural template of which those decisions are a part. There are many acculturating factors involved in the learning process as a subsistance-based economy becomes more monetised. The purchasing habits of tourists have little obvious effect. However, there is evidence that what is of value to tourists and what encourages them to visit the destination are not fully appreciated by many of the host population. Examples of these culturally dissimilar values are externalities such as the physical structures of the built environment and unquantifiable factors such as the ambience of the destination. It is argued that an understanding of the factors that have created cultural rules is necessary if a complete analysis of the effects of tourism is to be undertaken. This can be achieved by considering change as a process and tracing that process by examining the cultural history of the host community. Tourism should be seen as another aspect of change. The response to tourism will then be seen as a new challenge that will be met using the lessons previously learnt and incorporated into the cultural template.

This comparative study assessed the usefulness of the convergence thesis as a tool for understanding developments in leisure, recreation and sport in New Zealand and Malaysia. The study examined the interrelationship between 'global' and 'local' or 'contingent' factors and their impact upon leisure behaviour, leisure policy and leisure structures. 'Local' factors included institutional arrangements (notably political ones) and national cultural practices. A social history of New Zealand and Malaysia with particular reference to leisure, sport and recreation and national cultural practices was provided as a context for discussion of these issues. The study utilised a mixture of archival and library research and semi-structured interview, and was guided by an explicit comparative framework, concentrating on the development of leisure, sport and recreation in the two countries between 1970 and 2002. Interviews with 'key players' in both countries captured valuable data in the form of 'insiders' views' on leisure behaviour, policy and structure. These data were analysed with the relevance of the convergence thesis in mind. This study shows that contemporary leisure behaviour in New Zealand and Malaysia is shaped by the media and is highly commercialised, placing a high value on entertainment, and involves increasingly passive forms of participation. Informal sport and individualised recreational activities are replacing organised team-based sports in popularity. Leisure behaviour trends have led governments in both countries to encourage greater participation in sport and physical activity and to encourage private sector ventures into leisure-related products, services and infra-structures in the form of private-public partnerships. In terms of leisure policy, developments in leisure, recreation and, noticeably, sport, in Malaysia and New Zealand have been shaped by the wider agendas of the governing political parties. This is particularly noticeable at central government level. Individual political leaders in both countries have been influential in setting leisure-related policy. They had the vision to see that sport in particular might serve wider, national interests and that investments in sport could help raise the profiles of their countries in international markets and among trading organisations and the regulatory bodies that oversee trading practices. Malaysian and New Zealand governments seek to make leisure, sport and recreation policy supportive of other priorities. In Malaysia, the government legitimises its control over the policies which affect people's lives by appeals to Islamic principles and the need to put collective needs of nation building ahead of individual concerns for freedom. In terms of institutional, political, arrangements, this impacts at both central and local government levels in Malaysia. New Zealand, following a pluralist, Westminster, tradition of political representation, experiences regular changes in political management at central government level and a system of local government whereby local autonomy is jealously protected. Malaysia has resisted 'the global', by virtue of the nation-building policies of the Barisan Nasional, which has been in power since 1957. New Zealand's 'resistance' stems in part at least from the autonomy which local government enjoys. These experiences demonstrate that resistance to 'global' change can take varied forms at the 'local', contingent, level (Thorns, 1992). Differences in leisure structures reflect, once again, different agendas stemming from different political arrangements. The Malaysian government's approach is multi-Ministry, and micro-managed. In New Zealand, a 'hands off' approach via a quasi-autonomous non-government organisation (‘Quango'), became the favoured means of structuring central government leisure provision in the 1980s and 1990s. This was with a view to encouraging stability and consistency in leisure policy and provision in a pluralistic political system. Overall, and 'cautiously', this study provided support for the convergence thesis as a way to explain development in leisure, recreation and sport in New Zealand and Malaysia over the past 32 years. Although institutional arrangements and national cultural practices have provided some resistance to convergence processes, changing consumer sentiments may weaken such resistance in future.