What makes people want to save the world? A study of behavioural drivers towards environmental consciousness in tourism-driven Himalayan Towns: The case of Dharamshala, India

Rapid urbanization often raises conflicts between social, economic and environmental concerns. How these concerns are prioritized depends as much on government policies as they do on individual choices of the users in a given context. Moreover, it is these individual choices that shape larger community structures and consequently drive an urban development process deeply rooted in people versus place dynamics. This tussle between top-down policy making and bottom-up community subtleties must be addressed from both ends to achieve a thriving participatory governance approach to urban development. In this context, behavioural studies can provide valuable insights into the perceptions, attitudes and actions of individuals to gauge how people react to such developmental processes and how they choose to engage in them.

With respect to place dynamics, it is also evident that certain contexts are more environmentally vulnerable than others. The case of the Himalayan mountain regions is one such context where environmental management can be a challenging prospect, yet remains a highly crucial and contested notion, especially in light of local socio-cultural considerations which fall at the cusp of high exposure to urban systems in a predominantly rural and peri-urban milieu. This thesis takes up a case study of the city of Dharamshala in India which lies in the Himalayan mountain range in India and has a uniquely rich and vibrant cultural context placed within a heavily tourism-driven economic system bearing heavily on an ecologically vulnerable setting. In trying to understand the governance-related undercurrents of developmental planning in this region, this research adopts a strategy of combining behavioural studies with urban planning, environmental management and tourism development perspectives. The aim is to understand what drives people’s attitudes and behaviour towards environmental preservation in Dharamshala with respect to individual psychological constructs along with broader structural systems that influence these constructs.

To this end, the concept of ‘environmental consciousness’ is employed to provide a statistical framework to assess various socio-psychological and socio-structural drivers that determine pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour in individuals. This quantitative approach is combined with a qualitative study to derive results on the relationship between individual and collective action and thus build on existing knowledge of community participation towards the governance of common pool resources. The findings bring to fore the role of community engagement as a factor of the local populace’s felt personal responsibility and pride towards their city linked with the larger institutional setup of the context. Also found to be important are the role of specific population groups such as the refugee Tibetan population and certain tourists who show greater involvement in pro-environmental action along with a notable impact of the tourism industry on this phenomenon.