From nature conservation to geotourism development: Examining ambivalent attitudes towards UNESCO directives with the global geopark network

Abstract

We will begin by showing how Geoparks have not been created ex nihilo, but are rather the result of a trend towards the increased granting of heritage status to nature and natural features (the creation of National Parks in the US, the Man & Bio-sphere programme, the World Heritage Trust, etc.) combined with a desireto boost economic development in rural regions, primarily driven by the promotion of tourism. Their development has required Geoparks to conform to international standards, prin-cipally the creation of the European Geopark Network (EGN) in 2000, followedby the Global Geopark Network (GGN) in 2004, the Arouca Declaration (2011) and the crea-tion UNESCO Global Geoparks (UGG) in 2015. The introduction of international gov-ernance has sparked an explosion in the granting of heritage status alongside Geopark creation in many countries, but has also led to the emergence of conflicts over this heritage attribution, as well as how geotourism and its aims are interpreted. The am-bivalent reception within the Global Geoparks Network towards “top-down” directivesfrom UNESCO strikes us as an interesting prism through which to examine how the presence of different stakeholders (managers, scientists) and their differing concep-tions of geotourism reveal divergent views of heritage status and its interpretation within the territoriesconcerned.