| Summary: | Camping is an increasingly popular way for tourists to travel within New Zealand and around the world. Allowing tourists to save money, stay close to attractions, and maximise their flexibility of travel, camping provides a convenient accommodation option for domestic and international tourists alike. Although camping has occurred throughout human history, camping in the 21st century is evolving into an increasingly mobile phenomenon. As a result of the growing popularity of mobile forms of camping in New Zealand, campgrounds and communities across the country are being placed under considerable pressure during the summer months. There is evidence that this situation is causing tensions between local residents and tourists, and creating a plethora of management issues for local authorities and tourism organisations in New Zealand. While some of these tensions have been reported by the New Zealand news media, current scholarly work on camping is dominated by research documenting the experiences of the campers themselves, and fails to examine the perspectives of local stakeholders. Camping research has also been biased towards place-based theories, and has largely overlooked the mobile nature of camping in New Zealand today. Consequently, the current study applies a mobilities perspective to camping using qualitative interviews (n=17) with local tourism organisations, councils, and other camping managers in the Mackenzie Basin and Waitaki Valley of the South Island of New Zealand. By employing Cresswell (2010)’s mobilities concepts of movement and representation, a number of political tensions and perceptions about camping in the case study area were unearthed. These included the perception of campers as a non-homogenous group, the tendency for camping managers to perceive camper movement differently based on factors such as self-containment and vehicle-type, and the imbalance in terms of the speed of information movement between various camping stakeholders. Further qualitative analysis of these factors suggests ...
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