Commodifying Landscape to Conserve It? The Politics of Highest and Best Use of Land in Indonesian UNESCO Geoparks

This chapter will discuss the transformation of places into tourism destinations by analyzing the relationship between UNESCO geopark development in Indonesia at the local and regional level and the resulting processes of landscape commodification, highlighting the negotiated dimensions of land valuing. Thereby, the chapter unravels who benefits from the establishment of geoparks, how these interventions rely on creating a rent gap, and how they contribute to developing a tourism destination and the concurrent transformations of the community. Landscapes are continually transformed and commodified for tourism purposes globally. Indicative of this are transport and service infrastructure investments and real-estate developments with concomitant price increases for land. On the positive side, these investments and developments create opportunities for local and national governments to generate revenues from landscape conservation. At the same time, local communities adapt to the situation by redefining the value of landscapes, which in turn affects their everyday livelihood strategies in these landscapes. This chapter critically summarizes research on these dynamics and reflects on two geoparks: the Ciletuh-Palabuhanratu Geopark and the Gunung Sewu Geopark. These two cases are part of a larger PhD project nearing completion and represent different practicalities and processes of land valuing and rent gap creation that signify the initial stage of place transformations to tourism destinations.