Conflicting landscapes – integrating sustainable tourism in nature park developments

The aim of this paper is to analyse conflicting landscape associations linked to nature-based tourism in nature parks. Drawing from the literature on nature-based tourism development, social imaginaries and an R&D project in one of the largest former wetlands in Denmark – now a drained nature park, we examine how diversified landscape perceptions and conflicting landscape preferences result from and condition the re-enchantment of nature parks for tourism development.
The case study relies on various procedures. First, a combination of local accounts and fieldwork observations of tourism and landscapes. Second, interviews with tourists and local stakeholders on processes of engagement and disengagement with conservation, restoration, and re-wilding processes. Third, collaborative mapping with local stakeholders and citizens and their imaginaries of local nature – identity, preferences, and practice. By combining literature reviews with findings from the case study, we derive different social imaginaries of landscape approaches among tourism entrepreneurs, property owners, farmers, industrial actors, nature conservationists, local citizens, and NGOs. Six conflicting landscape imaginaries are identified that, to varying degrees, may apply to other nature parks. Each approach holds quite different human-nature relations and views on what needs to be sustained locally, and what landscapes need to be developed.
We conclude that conflicting but usually unspoken positions and preferences over landscapes (geo-positionalities) may hinder interventions for sustainable transition, and that mapping these landscape positionalities may be useful for deliberation in tourism development initiatives.