Visitor and tourism management is a major component of parks and protected areas. Management plans are important public accountability documents. Research on the policy content of those documents is lacking. This paper uses the concepts of plan quality and plan detail to assess the scale and depth of visitor and tourism policies within park management plans of Ontario Provincial Parks. The research found low levels of plan detail for most of 30 identified areas of visitor and tourism policy in the management plans. However, the overall park organization often had such policies identified in park agency policy documents other than the park plans. The research concludes that these plans are not good plans, due to low levels of plan quality and plan detail, at least in regard to visitor and tourism policies. Suggestions are made on the factors causing this policy void and methods to improve planning practice in the future. The paper provides a method and definitions, with 5 levels of policy detail, which provide more guidance for planners than heretofore available. This research should enable a much more precise definition of policy detail for visitor and tourism policy in plans than has occurred in the literature to date.
Keywords: Park planning | Management plans | Plan quality | Plan detail | Tourism | Visitor management

Establishing a vision of what is possible and desirable is a critical stage in any transformation process. Gray, Brennan, and Malpas, (2014) build on a series of articles that have critiqued the impact of the social accounting academic community and the merits (futility?) of further developing this field (e.g. Gray, 2002; Gray, Dillard, & Spence, 2009; Gray & Tinker, 2003; Lehman, 2001, 2002; Neu, Cooper, & Everett, 2001; Owen, 2008; Parker, 2011; Spence, Husillos, & Correa-Ruiz, 2010; Ruiz & Laine, 2014). What differentiates Gray et al. (2014) (see also Bebbington and Larrinaga, 2014) is that it goes beyond critique, presents a normative analysis of alternative ‘voyages of exploration’ for social accounting research and provides a vision of what social accounting should be. This vision includes different scenarios where social accounting and accountability practices (appropriately reconstituted) could be effectively integrated into sustainable transformation programmes. Gray et al. (2014) provide new insights into social accounting through the lens of Wright’s theoretical framing, identify social accounting practices with interstitial transformative potential and suggest an agenda for future social accounting and accountability research. There are so many aspects of this paper that are worthy of further reflection, but I would like to focus on how to construct a ‘responsible’ social accounting academic community aligned with the normative objective of sustainable transformation.