O espelho das concessões turísticas em Parques Nacionais do Brasil: uma perspectiva sobre vulnerabilidades

Abstract

Considering the socio-environmental issue, protected areas (PA) become a pre-condition for the socioeconomic development of contemporary society, which under the sustainability paradigm, assumes tourism as a conservation tool, considering its potential for generating economic and social benefits and appreciation of the environmental and cultural heritage. Tourism concessions in PA, as an institutional arrangement, emerge as an alternative to take advantage of this potential and to distribute benefits, which in practice presents a set of limitations as a tool for sustainable development, considering the political and institutional contexts. Assuming that concessions are developed from a neoliberal conservation perspective and its contradictions, this research aims to understand how the political and institutional context of tourism concessions in national parks in Brazil can imply in the PA tourist system vulnerabilities. Based on a theoretical-conceptual and empirical analysis, through a qualitative method approach, this research sought to answer: What does the vulnerability of the PA tourism system refer to and what are its fundamental elements and factors? What are the factors that increase vulnerabilities? What is the political, regulatory, and ideological basis that structures tourist concessions in Brazilian national parks? What are its main responses, limitations and gaps and how do these elements can be relate to the vulnerabilities of a PA tourism system? The results point that the main limitations refer to the difficulties of implementing effective actions in favor of the PA conservation and for social empowerment, as well as satisfactorily assessing the quality of services and the real environmental and social implications of public use. Such limitations are mainly due to the lack of public support that weakens institutional capacity, difficulties involved in the management and monitoring of concessions and the lack of private organizations’ commitment. In turn, these weaknesses are related to the historical, political, and institutional context of the policy’s evolution, aligned with the neoliberal conservation principles. Considering that PA tourism system vulnerability represents the condition that enhances its susceptibility to a harm as well as limits its ability to attract visitors and meet the needs of the tourism chain, including all social actors, and the environmental conservation; as a product of a set of political, institutional, economic, historical-cultural, social and environmental factors; this research points that the main factors related to the progression of vulnerability refer to these limitations which emerge from the context of conflicting agendas under a neoliberal conservation perspective.