Abstract
This article pursues 2 objectives: First, we show how a national park project in the Swiss Alps, Parc Adula, was addressed in contemporary neoliberal discourses on conservation and how these discourses influenced the rejection of the park. Second, we use triangulation to bridge the gap between 2 data analysis approaches, combining qualitative methods with the quantitative analytical tools of corpus linguistics. This allows an in-depth analysis of discourses surrounding and influencing national park planning. Furthermore, we outline challenges faced by conservation incentives based on discursive gaps and different uses of language in the arguments of government officials and residents affected by park negotiations. In the case of Parc Adula, these discursive gaps and language differences created distrust and made park planning difficult. This further reinforced a discursive disruption within and between neoliberal understandings of conservation and local discourses, eventually leading to the rejection of the national park project. This paper presents a novel analytical perspective on current conservation issues in Alpine areas and opens up ground for further research on communication practices, their local embeddedness, and their impacts on protected area establishment.
Highlights
Global change processes, such as neoliberalization and climate change, increasingly affect everyday life in the Alpine regions of central Europe (Boesch et al 2008; Job 2008; Pro€bstl-Haider and Pu€tz 2016; Mu€ller-Jentsch 2017)
Regions might benefit economically from a certification label referring to a protected area
We focus on a case study in the Swiss Alps: the effort to create a national park called Parc Adula, which was rejected by voters in late 2016
Summary
Global change processes, such as neoliberalization and climate change, increasingly affect everyday life in the Alpine regions of central Europe (Boesch et al 2008; Job 2008; Pro€bstl-Haider and Pu€tz 2016; Mu€ller-Jentsch 2017). In Switzerland, the ambiguity of this approach to conservation shows in the fact that the Parks Ordinance is part of the Federal Act on the Protection of Nature and Cultural Heritage, whereas new protected areas, especially regional nature parks, are perceived and discussed as a means for regional economic development (Knaus and Backhaus 2014). We aimed for a closed text corpus as the basis of quantitative analyses, which calls for stable conditions of data acquisition (Glasze and Mattissek 2009) To this end, we conducted 16 problemcentered interviews (Flick 2005) in summer 2015 with actors belonging to the park project management team (hereafter ‘‘park management’’), government, and NGOs, as well as with local residents who were not formally involved in park project management or planning. Whereas quantitative analysis provides limited insight into contents and meanings of the data, such as opinions regarding Parc Adula, qualitative coding and interpretation can help to better locate and understand discourses about the park proposal. To understand code relations and to better contextualize discourses, we composed a diagram, showing the most common codes and subcodes and their co-occurrence with other codes, using MaxQDA software (Figure 6)
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