The Role of Trust in the Participatory Establishment of Protected Areas—Lessons Learnt from a Failed National Park Project in Switzerland

Abstract

This article explores the reasons for the local rejection of a proposed national park in Switzerland. Using a mixed-methods approach and resorting to qualitative and quantitative data, we follow the thread of trust issues in the participatory planning process of a protected area. Different rationales and discourses, both project-specific but also more general, influenced the opinions of local stakeholders. Connecting these different opinions was the issue of (dis)trust, which weaves in and out of prominent lines of argumentation and informs individual sentiments. The application of a multidimensional trust framework helps to understand the influence of different types of trust on protected area negotiations. We discuss how a focus on rational trust building can help to sharpen the diverse goals of contemporary protected areas with integrated conservation and economic development schemes, as well as enable the emergence of other types of trust to facilitate conservation debates.

Keywords:

• Decentralized natural resource management
• Europe
• parks and protected areas
• trust

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editors and four reviewers for their very substantial and helpful reviews. We highly appreciate the time they spent to help us with our manuscript. We would also like to thank Dr. Timothy Tait-Jamieson for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this article and Timo Oliveri for his assistance with editing. We are very grateful to all our interviewees to have shared their time, opinions, and stories with us.

Notes

1 Switzerland is a semi-direct democracy: A representative democracy with strong direct democratic structures that allows citizens of age to express their opinion on decisions taken by the federal parliament and to propose amendments to the Federal Constitution (FDFA 2019).

2 The member states of the Swiss confederation are called “Cantons.” Cantonal autonomy as well as cantonal participation in federal processes are the key features of Swiss federalism (see Vatter 2018).

3 The questions of the 2017 survey are provided in Methods SOM 03, Supplemental. For more detailed descriptive statistics of the variables, see Backhaus et al. (2018).

4 See Pleger (2017) for further explanation on the advantages of Bayesian modelling for the analysis of the acceptance of land use policy measures.

5 The models were calculated in MLwiN 2.35 using MCMC estimation, based on Bayesian estimations (100,000 iterations, burn-in: 50,000–100,000, thinning: 1).

6 The variable in the regression model was based on the approval of the pre-given statement “Parc Adula would have helped to sustainably preserve nature.” As the interviews were open-ended, the qualitative and quantitative results regarding this aspect cannot be directly compared.

7 See Michel and Backhaus (2019) on the influence of stereotypes on park negotiations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Cantons of Grisons and Ticino; the Federal Office for the Environment; and by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under project [10001A_152785 9]: Morality and the development of national parks: Social and political negotiations in Abel Tasman National Park (New Zealand) and in Park Adula (Switzerland).