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Tourism's Potential for Financing Conservation Areas: A Study of Kufri-Chail-Naldehra Area of Himachal Pradesh, India

Environmental resources often constitute the core of the tourism product and are hence most susceptible to overuse and misuse. While the industry uses these resources almost free of cost, their conservation requires sufficient money. Owing to their financial constraints, governments often find it difficult to generate funds for protection and maintenance of even conservation areas. It is therefore essential to price the environmental resources in a way that the users pay a reasonable charge for the use. Funds so generated should be used for maintenance of these areas. The real difficulty lies in the fact that while the prices of common utilities like water, power, irrigation and services are determined by the market forces, the recreational benefits like scenery, forests, heritage and biodiversity being public goods, are not marketed, making it difficult to put a price on them. Using the Contingent Valuation Method, surveys were administered on three groups of people, namely, the tourists, industry representatives, and resident communities (collectively referred to as stakeholders). The study endeavours to identify the values that stakeholders attach to the environmental resources in the area. It is argued that the recovery of these use and non-use values could play an important role in contributing funds towards the preservation and/or conservation of common-pool resources.