An ANP Approach to Assess the Sustainability of Tourist Strategies for the Coastal National Parks of Venezuela
An ANP Approach to Assess the Sustainability of Tourist Strategies for the Coastal National Parks of Venezuela

Summary/Abstract: Decision-making for sustainable development involves high levels of uncertainty. In the present paper a study about sustainable management of tourism in national parks is presented. A case study approach is applied to coastal national parks (NP) in Venezuela. Tourism can contribute to the sustainability of national parks but currently it is their main cause of environmental impact. The Government of Venezuela and its natural park managers are therefore looking for new sustainable tourism development strategies. To help managers in making decisions about NP sustainability a new multicriteria approach based on the Analytic Network Process (ANP) technique is proposed. ANP provides a more realistic approach for modelling complex situations such as decision making for sustainable tourism management because ANP allows the general study of the quantitative and qualitative explanatory variables and the incorporation of feedback and interdependence relationships among variables. A case study has been carried out with the help of two experts closely related to the 12 coastal NP analyzed and 8 stakeholders of “Los Roques” national park who provided most of the information needed.

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