Commodifying Landscapes for Tourism: Insights from land use transformation in Indonesian geopark tourism developments

Samenvatting

This PhD project contributes to the theoretical and empirical discussion of tourism and landscape conservation in the Global South. This thesis aims to understand the effects of landscape commodification in geo-heritage sites contributing to ways of recognising the multiple interests at stake and how these are differentially represented and perceived in the context of Indonesian patrimonial society.

The thesis then examines the details of this process through notions of geoheritage landscape commodification, the governance of land use transformation for tourism in patrimonial society, and community responses and engagement towards land use transformation in geopark area. Specifically, this
thesis contributes to three research fields in the academic debates on tourism
geography concerning the process of landscape commodification through rent gap
creation, its governance structure, and the contesting responses of the communities affected by those tourism development projects in Indonesian
Geoparks.

While extensive literature exists on land use acquisition through
rent gap and tourism gentrification processes affecting residential communities
in urban settings, this thesis explicitly focuses on the much lesser trodden
path of rural landscape commodification in the Global South and rent gap
creation processes in the Indonesian governance context.