Protected Areas, Sustainable Tourism and Neo-liberal Governance Policies

Issues, management and research

Hubert Job, Susanne Becken, Bernard Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367586485
• eBook ISBN: 9780429856303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

From its late nineteenth century origins, the concept of protected areas has increased in scope and complexity. It now has to come to terms with the twenty first century world of neo-liberal politics, performance metrics and the growing and complex demands of tourism. This international collection of papers explores how this might be done, detailing the issues involved, and the value and values that protected areas have for economies, peoples and environments. Special attention is given to World Heritage Sites, tourism planning and their communities, to the growth of private protected areas, and to the health values of protected areas. Other subjects include private sector business involvement in protected areas, concessions policy experiments, and how the work of the world's largest protected area agency, the US National Park Service, is adapting to changing political and market demands, and to the challenges of sustainable development. It concludes with a searching interview with a member of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee.

The chapters were originally published in a special issue in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Protected Areas in a neoliberal world and the role of tourism in supporting conservation and sustainable development: an assessment of strategic planning, zoning, impact monitoring, and tourism management at natural World Heritage Sites

Hubert Job, Susanne Becken and Bernard Lane

ABSTRACT Societies collapse when there is an increasing natural resource scarcity and growing stratification of society into rich and poor. The neoliberal world of targets, business plans and short term economic justification in which we live exacerbates these risks to society. It is imperative to find new ways of governing natural ecosystems that protect them from these risks and allows usage that helps close the development gap. Tourism in Protected Areas (PAs) is one important vehicle to achieve sustainable conservation and development outcomes. This paper highlights that the increasing focus on promoting human activity, especially tourism, in and around PAs is increasingly enshrined in the mandate and governance structures of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation natural World Heritage Sites and Biosphere Reserves. It reviews strategic planning, zoning, impact monitoring, and tourism management by analysing all 229 natural World Heritage Sites, revealing that both overall strategic planning and tourism planning in these sites need improvements, notably through more consistent monitoring systems. The paper concludes by exploring the benefits of embedding World Heritage Sites into Biosphere Reserves, with a particular focus on core zoning, regional product development, and improved monitoring standards, and suggests ways to disseminate good practice worldwide to all types of PAs.

Introduction: the wider context

Concern about planetary limits and the risks humankind is facing as a result of increasing environmental destruction is growing (Hall & Day, 2009). Preserving natural resources and environments, including through the mechanism of Protected Areas (PAs), has long been recognised as vital for societies to continue to exist and thrive. Diamond (2005), in his book on why societies collapse, proposed a five-point framework to capture the complexity of the human–environment relationship and long-term success. He suggests that large-scale decline in either human population and/or socioeconomic complexity is influenced by serious environmental problems, climate change (natural or anthropogenic), conflict with trade partners or neighbouring enemies, and problems arising from society’s own political, economic, and social arrangements. Building on this earlier work, and learning from patterns of societal collapse over history, Motesharrei, Rivas, and Kalnay (2014) extracted two key features that appear to influence whether societies collapse or not. One was the increasing scarcity of natural resources (the result of exceeding an ecological carrying capacity), and the other one was a heavy stratification of society into rich elites and poor commoners. Under the current conditions of an increasingly unequal society, Motesharrei and co-workers suggested that collapse is difficult to avoid; however, it is possible if we can reach an equilibrium in which the depletion rate of nature per head of population is sustainable, and if this depletion is more equally distributed.

It is clear that present and future attempts to ensure sustainability of humankind must focus on two key dimensions: the environment and the people that inhabit it. Today’s challenge is of much greater magnitude compared with earlier societies (e.g. the Roman Empire, the Mayan civilisation, the monument building Polynesian society on the Easter Islands) that existed on a regional scale and not a global one. In the planetary reach of the problem also lies an opportunity, as long as the world community is cognisant of the above risks and agrees collectively on key measures to avoid collapse. In the past, flourishing societies have successfully managed natural environments through functioning economic and political institutions; this could be achievable in today’s global society. Several major frameworks to develop more sustainable and equitable societies have recently been ratified, and are now being implemented. The two most important roadmaps are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (UNDP, 2016) and the “Paris Agreement” to combat global climate change (UNFCCC, 2015). Both are global in scale and universally applicable. These latest agreements build on a range of earlier frameworks and treaties, including some specifically dedicated to the conservation of our natural heritage, preservation of biodiversity and sustainable development. Whether these agreements are sufficient to avoid societal collapse depends amongst other factors on their implementation, but also on the purposeful integration of societal goals with environmental protection and the number and quality of PAs.

The key trends that determine the opportunity space of today’s society are visualised in Figure 1. An exponentially growing global population – and a concomitant increase in tourist activity – is at the core of substantial land use changes and pressures on resources. In previous centuries, natural ecosystems largely made way for intensive agriculture, irrigation agriculture and urban spaces, with a trend towards more and more people living in bigger cities far away from nature (WBGU, 2016). Population growth, economic activity, and urbanisation have – perhaps paradoxically – been accompanied by a global expansion of PAs. Zimmerer (2006) found that “experiencing nature” has become a superior good that is in increasing demand by those with higher per capita incomes. However, the increase of the total area designated as PAs did not necessarily equate to an improvement in conservation outcomes and biodiversity protection, as it is often the “less valuable” land that is protected and management effectiveness varies (Geldmann et al., 2015; Lama & Job, 2014). Nevertheless, the rapidly declining share of natural ecosystems illustrated in Figure 1 highlights the critical importance of PAs for preserving the few remaining intact ecosystems. Further loss could be irreversible and compromise the opportunity of “closing the equity gap” in remote and potentially disadvantaged communities – thus making collapse more likely.

PAs play a pivotal role in the challenging task of preserving the environment and using it at the same time. The intensifying pressure on PAs demands new approaches to governing resources so that they are protected and their values are distributed more equitably. This is not a trivial task, as PAs are now often charged with several mandates: halting the loss of biodiversity (Geldmann et al., 2015), nature conservation, providing recreational and tourism opportunities, as well as educational and spiritual or inspirational tasks, and the demonstrable production of economic benefits. Protecting ecosystem services can in some cases be converted into “hard cash”, for example through the sale of carbon credits (Dudley, Sandwith, & Belokurov, 2010), but in addition, governments look for income generation for local communities, job creation, royalties or other forms of state owned resource rent, and more recently, enhanced brand value and regional positioning in an increasingly globalised world (Bouma & van Beukering, 2015; Knaus, Ketterer Bonnelame, & Siegrist, 2017).

The acknowledgement of humans as acceptable elements in a PA socio-ecological system (Espiner & Becken, 2014; Mayer, Müller, Woltering, Arnegger, & Job, 2010)also bears risks. PAs are not immune from the global “land grab” (Engels, 2015), nor from the local valorisation of nature through various forms of resource extraction. Tourism forms part of this: the commercially focused tourism sector is firmly embedded within the broader neoliberal agenda (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2010). The current Dominant Social Paradigm (Pirages & Ehrlich, 1974) is strongly shaped by anthropocentric world views and a consumerist culture, in which material abundance, perpetual economic growth, and technological progress persist and prevail (Kilbourne, Beckmann, & Thelen, 2002). One might argue that these trends are nowhere more reflected than in the hedonic and self-centred activity of leisure travel (Becken, 2017). Moreover, this dominating paradigm aligns with liberal democracies that advocate extensive private property rights and minimal intervention by the public sector, which make it increasingly difficult to protect “public goods” such as natural areas and their associated ecosystem services (Albert et al., 2017). The implications of operating within the neoliberal agenda are explored in more detail by Slocum (2017). Furthermore, the establishment of private PAs with exclusive access arrangements and tightly managed business activities may present some interesting opportunities, as discussed in the case of Chile by Serenari, Peterson, Wallace and Stowhas (2017).

Figure 1. Land use changes, population, and tourism growth and the increasing importance of Protected Areas.

At the same time, the hopes attached to tourism and its perceived potential as a vehicle for sustainable development become nowhere more apparent than in the designation by the United Nations of the 2017 International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development. Benefits from PA tourism have long been recognised and studied in industrialized and developing countries (Carius, 2016; Job & Metzler, 2005; Job & Paesler, 2013), and the provision of visitor facilities and tourist experiences has moved to the core of management for many Parks (Butzmann & Job, 2017;Medeiros, Frickmann Young, Boniatti PAvese, & Silva Araújo, 2011; Müller, 2014). The links between tourism, conservation and rural regeneration are increasingly recognized and used by PA managements (Getzner, Lange Vik, Brendehaug, & Lane, 2014). Tourism in natural areas is also increasingly seen as a major avenue for increasing the physical and mental well-being of (often urban) visitors who reconnect with nature (e.g. well studied in the context of PAs in Finland, see Puhakka, Pitkänen, & Siikamäki, 2017). Discussions about visitation and well-being are also beginning to consider new (and sometimes marginalised) members of local PA communities (Khazaei, Elliot, & Joppe, 2017). As a result, visitation can play a key role in regional development, preservation of indigenous cultures, and local identities; all of which can be compatible with the conservation mandate, if managed effectively (Carius, 2016). The conflicts between nature-based tourism and other development pressures (see Becken & Job, 2014; Liburd & Becken, 2017), however, adds to the complexity of PA management, especially when areas are put on the red list of heritage in danger (Engels, 2015), when they are downsized and/or partly degazetted (Ferreira et al., 2014), and/or commodified to an extent that the very naturalness of the area is eroded or destroyed (Saarinen, 2016).

In summary, at times of intensifying neoliberalism, PAs must increasingly justify their existence by providing a robust business case for public sector investment, and often tourism plays a key role in demonstrating benefits, either in the establishment of a PA or in its ongoing existence. An example fromSagarmatha, Nepal, illustrates how entry fees, inparticular from international visitors, can generate much needed funds for both conservation and development (Baral, Kaul, Heinen, & Ale, 2017). The Special Issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism in which this paper is published therefore examines how and to what extent sustainable tourism could help fulfil the increasing demands now being placed on PAs. The notion of widening the designation of “sacred cows” to creating “cash cows” (Müller, 2014) is at the core of the Special Issue. It aims to critically examine key issues and developments in both the management a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Protected Areas in a neoliberal world and the role of tourism in supporting conservation and sustainable development: an assessment of strategic planning, zoning, impact monitoring, and tourism management at natural World Heritage Sites
• 2 Values in nature conservation, tourism and UNESCO World Heritage Site stewardship
• 3 Developing a typology of sustainable protected area tourism products
• 4 The effects of local context on World Heritage Site management: the Dolomites Natural World Heritage Site, Italy
• 5 Estimating the value of the World Heritage Site designation: a case study from Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park, Nepal
• 6 Private protected areas, ecotourism development and impacts on local people’s well-being: a review from case studies in Southern Chile
• 7 Tourism concessions in National Parks: neo-liberal governance experiments for a Conservation Economy in New Zealand
• 8 The health and well-being impacts of protected areas in Finland
• 9 Operationalising both sustainability and neo-liberalism in protected areas: implications from the USA’s National Park Service’s evolving experiences and challenges
• 10 Visitor spending effects: assessing and showcasing America’s investment in national parks
• 11 Fringe stakeholder engagement in protected area tourism planning: inviting immigrants to the sustainability conversation
• 12 An interview with a protected area insider
• Index