The Social Constructs of Natural World Heritage: An Ethnographic Investigation into the Conflicts of a Danish UNESCO Destination

Sammanfattning: This paper will investigate the conflicts that can arise during destination development following a World Heritage inscription. Previous literature mentions that conflicts arise, but focuses on a more managerial perspective, and fails to account for the characteristics of those conflicts. The aim of the paper is to account for the characteristics of the conflicts that arise, by trying to grasp how various stakeholders in the destination development process have different understandings of the destination, and how these understandings are undergoing negotiation after the destination has received the World Heritage inscription. The paper is thus focusing on Consumer Culture Theory and Cultural Geography, thereby adding a sociocultural perspective to the strongly managerial perspective on destination development. The paper is based on an ethnographic field study of the Nature World Heritage destination Stevns Klint, Denmark. After interviews with various stakeholders about the development processes that the area had undergone since being inscribed the UNESCO World Heritage label, it became clear the locals of Stevns embedded meaning into the landscape, thus the term appropriating space becomes relevant. According to this result, conflict arises in Stevns from differentiating meaning embeddings, but mainly because certain development initiatives contradict the commonly accepted identities of various areas along the cliff. Which leads us into the second conflict, which is based on the power structures that arise in commodification processes. Only those in charge of destination development get to manifest the aforementioned appropriations of space, creating politics of representation. From these results, it becomes clear that there is a need for a sociocultural perspective on destination development in order to understand why conflicts happen in recently inscribed World Heritage destinations.