Governing the social impacts of tourism in UNESCO Biosphere Reserves

Governing the social impacts of tourism within UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) has become a critical challenge, where conservation mandates intersect with development pressures and place-based livelihoods. As tourism intensifies in these multifunctional landscapes, social inequalities, tensions, and contestations increasingly surface, demanding governance approaches that move beyond sectoral planning and state-centric control. Framed by a multi-stakeholder spatial governance thinking, this paper examines how collaborative and place-sensitive governance processes can shape pathways for addressing tourism-related social impacts in UNESCO-BRs. Using the Adirondack High Peaks Region (USA), a popular tourist destination within the Champlain-Adirondack UNESCO-BR, as an illustrative geographical context, this paper presents results from a study that employed a sequential multi-methods design based on a three-phase case study approach. The paper contributes to broader conversations about the sustainability of tourism in protected areas, highlighting the importance of dynamic and adaptive collaboration between public, private, civil societies and local communities to achieve sustainability goals. This article makes a novel contribution to extant tourism geographies discourses by offering an empirically grounded multi-stakeholder-centred model to evaluate the social impact of tourism, advancing theoretical understandings of UNESCO-BRs governance that is transferable to other geographical contexts.