Support for large-scale tourism infrastructure projects: porters’ reactions to the proposed cable car development on Mount Kilimanjaro National Park in Tanzania
研究了坦桑尼亚乞力马扎罗山搬运工对拟建缆车项目的态度，发现他们的风险规避不仅涉及经济担忧，还包括身份和社会地位等非经济风险，对政策制定者有参考价值。
Destinations around the world are faced with tough choices regarding strategic tourism infrastructure projects promised to increase the economic benefits of tourism amid increasing global competition. As these ambitious infrastructure projects proliferate, a notable lack of research exists on how employees perceive the trade-offs associated with these projects. Residents employed in the tourism industry are one of the main beneficiaries of tourism, and any large-scale tourism infrastructure that disrupts the economic flows of tourism has implications for their livelihoods. A group of stakeholders with much to lose from a large-scale tourism infrastructure development project are the 10,000 porters employed on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, who stand to be impacted by a proposed cable car. This paper presents a novel mixed-method theoretical perspective, drawing from Prospect theory and Weber’s Theory of Formal and Substantive Rationality, which found that porters’ risk aversion was not limited to economic concerns linked to the cable car but also to non-economic risks to their identity and standing in their communities. Countries considering large-scale transformational tourism infrastructure projects need to consider how these developments alter stakeholders’ economic, psychological, social, and political empowerment because the fear of losing these benefits will likely draw opposition to the project.