CAUTHE is delighted to congratulate CAUTHE Fellow Professor Sara Dolnicar on the award of a highly prestigious ARC Laureate Fellowship, worth AU$3.2 million. These legacy-building grants facilitate ground-breaking, internationally competitive research to take place in Australia while also nurturing and mentoring early career researchers.
The ARC awards only 17 Laureate Fellowships annually across all disciplines. Being awarded a Laureate Fellowship is an enormous personal achievement for Sara, but also recognises that tourism research is needed, valuable and worth funding.
During her five-year fellowship, Sara and her team will create a new theory to explain and predict pro-environmental behaviour by consumers in a range of pleasure-focused settings, including tourism and leisure. Based on this theory, they will develop and experimentally test the effectiveness of practical interventions in reducing the amount of environmental harm caused.
This Fellowship will develop and validate a new theory that explains, predicts, and elicits pro-environmental conduct in pleasure-focused settings like tourism. It is significant in challenging the assumption of conventional theories about universal drivers of human behaviour, asserting instead that increased pleasure or changed infrastructure are needed to boost pro-environmental actions in hedonic contexts. The outcome and benefits will be in effective, evidenced-based social interventions that reduce the huge environmental burden of tourism and other pleasure-focused industries. Such interventions are urgently needed to manage the impacts arising from the extraordinary growth in sectors critical to the Australian economy.
The Australian Research Council (ARC) is a Commonwealth entity and advises the Australian Government on research matters, administers the National Competitive Grants.
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