Diane Lee

In a context where visitors seek enjoyment, adventure and fun, re-occurring injury and death represents a complex reality for national park management agencies. At one level, there is a need to understand why visitor incidents and accidents occur. Yet, arising at another level is the issue concerning who is responsible for preventing incidents. This chapter presents an overview of the current state of research on the complexities involved in managing risk in national parks from the pre-COVID-19 era and explores implications from the analysis under the new normal paradigm. Using Western Australia (WA) as a case study, we ponder what a new normal might look like in times when international travel restrictions coincide with government initiatives promoting regional tourism, and what this may mean for managing risk in our parks.

This chapter reports on a study supported by Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre, Australia (STCRC) concerning dolphin tourism at Monkey Mia in Western Australia Smith et al., 2006). Production and consumption of wildlife in terms of tourist space can be discussed through a spectrum of approaches from the anthropocentric form of narrative, where wildlife are viewed only in terms of their value to human kind, through to an ecocentric narrative where wildlife are seen to have their own right to existence. In essence, this represents the range of arguments from those who view wildlife as existing to be packaged and produced for consumption, to those who argue that wildlife should be simply that, and not be made available as a product. Dolphins have been the focus of tourism production and consumption at Monkey Mia since the 1970s, and this chapter endeavours to explore management of the conflict between preservation and use, and examine conservation management in this case undertaken by the Midwest Region of Conservation and Land Management (CALM), as a means to provide optimum outcomes for both wildlife and human life. Conservation seeks to balance the potential conflict and tensions between anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches.

This case study highlights issues of the production and distribution of knowledge and the harnessing of social, political and cultural capital (SPCC). The project relied on underlying SPCC to develop over its three years but more importantly, it had to contribute to SPCC in order to ‘hand-over’ the project and the knowledge developed throughout to the Tapestry region on completion. A clustering of resources is also obvious in the way in which a variety of ‘champions’ came together to carry out the project and economic competence is demonstrated by the ability to seek a variety of funding sources for the project and, again, for the continuation of the work. The innovations included new ways of understanding the dynamics of tourism in the region and mechanisms for undertaking planning.