Heritage and landscape narratives: how rural stereotypes are shaping UNESCO biosphere reserves

Protected areas and other areas with well-known designations, such as national parks and UNESCO World Heritage Sites, respectively, are paramount to tourism. These designations offer a narrative through which visitors can interpret and experience the local landscape and culture. For many designation types, those narratives are clear: iconic landscapes and nature experiences in national parks and outstanding cultural value at world heritage sites, for example. But what about UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs)? Which landscape narratives are shaping the discourse and perception of BRs, and how do they integrate their sometimes contradictory or contentious dual mandate of both conservation and sustainable development? To understand how BRs interpret and narrate their landscapes, we conducted a comparative analysis of the communication of nine European BRs located throughout Germany, Italy and Sweden. Using a constructivist concept of essentialization, we examined how the BRs define their characteristic features and signature experiences. Despite the cultural, ecological, and socioeconomic diversity of the sites analyzed, we observed an overarching narrative of 'rurality', which repetitively over-simplified rural areas with stereotypical and nostalgic depictions. Considering this against the framework of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme, the findings of this research reveal a gap, as topics that are commonly associated with sustainable development, like innovation, technology, digitalization, renewable energy, transportation, subculture, and art are rarely ever addressed. By framing BRs as rural idylls, the processes of urbanization are largely overlooked, even though they are crucial for sustainability and should therefore have a firm place in the MAB programme, whose mandate is to design models for sustainable development. Moreover, prioritizing tourism as the primary development strategy, particularly when based on idealized rurality narratives, risks creating a path dependency that hinders alternative drivers for innovation that do not align with this narrative.