Title: Examining the antecedent role of biosphere value, environmental usefulness and ecotourism involvement: an empirical study

Authors: Santanu Mandal; Arun Chandran; Meenakshi Kanakaraj; R. Sourav; Payel Das

Addresses: Department of Business Analytics, GITAM Institute of Management, GITAM (Deemed to be University), Rushikonda, Vishakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh-530045, India ' Amrita School of Business, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu-641112, India ' Amrita School of Business, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu-641112, India ' Amrita School of Business, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu-641112, India ' School of Communications, XIM University, Bhubaneshwar, Odisha-752050, India

Abstract: While recently there has been the increasing importance of ecotourism and sustainable behaviour, studies have not been able to address substantially the generation of individual dimensions of ecotourism behaviour. The current investigation explores the role of perceived biosphere value, perceived environmental usefulness, and ecotourism involvement for understanding the growth of socio-cultural beneficial behaviour, economically beneficial behaviour and environmental friendly behaviour. The study has seven latent variables that were operationalised in a first order. All the constructs were developed based on established scales, complemented with pre-test and expert feedback. The data were collected from individuals who are frequent travellers to nature-based destinations. The study had 108 usable responses. The study used partial least squares in R-Studio to validate the proposed associations. Results suggest a prominent role of ecotourism involvement and perceived biosphere value in shaping the different variants of ecotourism behaviour.

Keywords: biosphere value; ecotourism involvement; ecotourism behaviour; tourist behaviour.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSE.2023.127735

International Journal of Sustainable Economy, 2023 Vol.15 No.1, pp.47 - 71

Received: 08 Aug 2021
Accepted: 24 Oct 2021
Published online: 15 Dec 2022 *