Stakeholders' perceptions on governance to protect hot spring landscapes in Lin Yi, Shandong, China

China’s rapid economic growth, particularly in tourism, has led to significant investment in hot spring tourism, but this has resulted in environmental degradation. The rapid sprawl around urban areas in China meant that semi-urban and rural areas around urban centers were prone to more development, with the development taking place primarily around natural resources such as river banks, lake shores, and hot spring surroundings. The lack of effective management of natural landscapes around hotsprings meant that hotspring landscapes were subject to degradation due to the uncontrolled development around them. To address these issues, this study aims to investigate the issues of the existing framework and the inclusive governance framework, determine the role of stakeholders’perceptions and the challenges faced in achieving inclusive governance, and develop a framework for inclusive governance to protect the hot spring landscape in China. Thus, this study’s approach represents a unique attempt to address a gap in the literature by amalgamating the knowledge acquired from the public and the knowledge gathered by subject matter experts to propose a framework to manage and protect hotspring landscapes by implementing inclusive governance. To achieve these objectives, a multi-case study qualitative approach was employed, involving two interviews and a series of exploratory site visits to the selected locations. The findings of the two interviews involving both the public and a set of experts, coupled with the findings of the site visits, highlighted the set of current challenges faced when attempting to achieve inclusive governance and the set of implications of the lack of inclusive governance. The findings emphasized the importance of stakeholder involvement, public perception, and local knowledge for successful conservation efforts. Furthermore, the findings highlighted challenges such as a lack of awareness, resources, and conflicting interests. Additionally, a triangulation of the findings of the various techniques indicated a set of themes deduced by theoretical replication logic, accentuating the validity of the study’s proposed conceptual framework. The existing governance framework suffers from fragmented governance due to multiple departments and conflicting regulations. This lack of clarity and coordination hinders effective hot spring landscape protection. Additionally, the absence of a defined protection framework and limited stakeholder involvement further complicates the issue. Thus, this study put forward a refined version of the proposed framework to be utilized to guide the implementation of inclusive governance to manage and protect hotspring landscapes in China. Moreover, the framework can be utilized by practitioners such as decision-makers and researchers in the areas of resources and landscape management to guide their future initiatives in both practical implementation of inclusive governance and research attempts investigating the implementation of inclusive governance to manage hotspring landscapes more effectively. Furthermore, the findings of this study could be utilized to raise awareness among the public and the various specialist groups regarding the importance of inclusive governance in the management and protection of natural landscapes in general and hotspring landscapes specifically.

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