Project description

Area protection in Europe is undergoing a paradigmatic reorientation, with a primarily segregative approach being replaced by increasingly integrative area protection. As "living landscapes", protected areas are to become model areas that demonstrate how regions can shape sustainable development. Actors from politics, business and civil society, as well as the regional population, associate a wide range of expectations with the establishment of a large protected area (MPA), which is why MPAs are increasingly seen as instruments of regional development, especially in peripheral rural areas. In this context, there is an increasing spread of regional brands in various GSGs, which act as a kind of crystallisation core and promise mutual synergies for GSGs and regional brands. To date, however, there has been a lack of comprehensive research focussing on regional brands for GSG regions.

This project, which is being carried out jointly with RWTH Aachen University, aims to identify dissemination channels and central framework conditions for brand development, as well as brand characteristics, actors and their interaction for selected regional brands in the context of GSG in Europe and to identify the resulting adjustments to the concept, especially with regard to forms of protected area governance. In addition, the potential for sustainable development associated with the brands will be identified and existing brand concepts compared. To this end, selected regional brands in GSG regions from two groups of countries (France, Spain, Portugal and Austria, Hungary, Romania) will be analysed as part of a comparative case study investigation.

Management

Prof Dr Ingo Mose

Collaborators

Maren Kleinau