Residents’ Environmentally Responsible Behavior: An Insight into Sustainable Destination Development

The consumption of tourism products, alongside its economic benefits, always brings about the depletion of a tourism destination's natural resources. This reality exerts pressure on destination marketers and managers to ensure the preservation of the resources without compromising the economic gains of tourism development. Given this dichotomy, understanding and implementation of a sustainable tourism destination are critical to balance either side of the scale. Therefore, the current thesis is designed to develop and test a conceptual model for sustainable destination development that considered residents’ environmentally friendly behavior as an outcome of community attachment and community involvement. Further, the dissertation posited that environmental attitudes mediate the relationship between the predicting variables (community attachment and community involvement) and the predicted variable (environmentally friendly behavior). The data were collected through a questionnaire from 300 Cypriots living in Famagusta and analyzed using PLS-SEM. The findings demonstrated that community attachment, community involvement, and environmental attitude influence the residents’ environmentally responsible behaviors. Discussion and implications for destination managers, limitations, and recommendations for future research directions are also provided at the end of the thesis.