Dr. Zou hiking a snow-covered trail at the Great Smokey Mountains National Park.
We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Sharon Suiwen Zou as the Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship’s inaugural Visiting Scholar. Dr. Zou joins us while on sabbatical at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism.
During her time at UC Berkeley, Dr. Zou aims to explore how national park user fees can benefit conservation beyond park boundaries, particularly in the Greater Yellowstone area. Dr. Zou brings a wealth of expertise at the intersection of parks, people, and conservation. Her research focuses on visitor management, fee systems, and conservation finance in national parks and other protected places. She is driven to conduct research that has a strong, tangible impact and fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, which are deeply-held values at the Stone Center.
Dr. Zou (far left) and her research team working in the field for a fee project at the Indiana Dunes National Park.
Considering Equity & Justice in National Park Fees
Born and raised in Guangzhou, China, Dr. Zou earned her BS in Events and Tourism Management from Sun Yat-Sen University. She then moved to the U.S. for graduate school, receiving her MS and Ph.D. in Recreation, Park, and Tourism Sciences from Texas A&M University. An avid hiker and backpacker, she’s intimately familiar with the joy spending time in nature brings. At the same time Dr. Zou is acutely aware that national parks (like public lands) are often under-resourced in the U.S. This fuels her dedication to ensuring protected areas are better funded, and that local communities benefit from visitors coming to experience these places.
Dr. Zou is particularly interested in approaching user and entrance fees from the perspective of a social scientist. This includes understanding what motivates visitors and other key stakeholders, such as local communities, tourism operators and NGOs, to support fees to access public lands, and what are their preferences for how this money is spent. Her work delves into how people conceptualize fairness and justice in this context, including considering discounts for low-income visitors, seniors, or local residents.
National Park Visitors as Contributors to Conservation
At the Stone Center, Dr. Zou will partner with Arthur Middleton and Kristin Barker, and Hillary Flint, a close collaborator with the Stone Center at the University of Wyoming. Together, they will consider how entrance fees from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks could support conservation efforts outside of the park. This builds off of a recent paper, co-authored by Hillary and Arthur, that found contributing entrance fees to local conservation efforts has widespread support from park visitors. For example, this could include support for private ranchers whose lands are vital for local wildlife migration. As part of this effort, Dr. Zou is conducting local fieldwork in partnership with PERC (Property and Environment Research Center), and will have the chance to connect with economists, social scientists, and stakeholders like tourism business communities and park superintendents. Dr. Zou will also explore the possibility of an entrance fee for international visitors, and how such systems could be implemented in a way that garners public support and similarly supports conservation.
For more information about Dr. Zou’s work, please visit her faculty page.