Inter-firm cooperation at nature-based tourism destinations

The potential benefits from environmental protection to a nature-based tourism destination do not automatically translate into cooperation between individual tourism businesses. In this paper, several factors conducive to cooperation regarding the use of shared environmental resources are identified from the common property literature and the literature on regional clusters. Inter-firm environmental cooperation is expected to materialise in nature-based tourism clusters because the environment is the major regional characteristic that determines the competitiveness of the cluster. The theoretical findings are illustrated with empirical evidence from Tropical North Queensland, Australia.