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18 - The socioeconomic, educational and legal aspects of whale-watching

A Scottish case study

from Part IV - Sustainable management: insights and issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2014

By
E.C.M. Parsons
Edited by
James Higham ,
Lars Bejder  and
Rob Williams
E.C.M. Parsons
Affiliation:
University of London
James Higham
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
Lars Bejder
Affiliation:
Murdoch University, Western Australia
Rob Williams
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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Summary

Introduction

Between 1995 and 2000 the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) held a number of workshops on various aspects of whale-watching. The first discussed the scientific aspects (IFAW, 1995) of the activity, but in 1997 there were three workshops on the more social and managerial aspects of the industry, including a workshop on the educational impacts of whale-watching (IFAW, 1997) which also included debate about ways to persuade whale-watching operators to use codes of conduct to minimize their impacts, and another workshop on the legal aspects of whale-watching (IFAW, 2000). The third was on the socioeconomic impacts of whale-watching (IFAW, 1999). A global review of all of these aspects of whale-watching would arguably be a book, or books, by themselves. Therefore, this current chapter builds on some of the ideas and suggestions raised in these workshops for a specific case study in Scotland, an area where there has been substantive and quantitative research into these areas. The last workshop in the series mentioned above (IFAW, 2001) discussed issues such as the conflict between whale-watching and whaling in certain locations, and the potential negative socioeconomic impacts, and this is also briefly discussed in this chapter.

Whale-watching in Scotland

The first official whale-watching business (Sea-life Surveys) in Scotland, indeed for the entire UK, began in 1989 on the island of Mull. Hoyt (2001) estimated that there were at least 35 land- and boat-based whale-watching activities in Scotland by 1998. Hughes (2001) suggested that in the UK there was an overall growth in public interest to seeing cetaceans in the wild from the late 1980s onwards, and a move away from tourism involving captive cetaceans – indeed, all of the captive cetacean facilities in the UK had closed by the mid-1990s, whereas there was a positive growth in wild cetacean-watching opportunities, particularly in eastern Scotland, focused on the resident common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) population in the Moray Firth.

Type
Chapter
Information
Whale-watching
Sustainable Tourism and Ecological Management
 , pp. 263 - 274
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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