Projecting Development through Tourism: Patrimonial Governance in Indonesian Geoparks

Research on governance of tourism development predominantly focuses on sustainable management of a tourism destination, pinning hopes on the market and individual entrepreneurs. In Indonesia, this mission has been codified in post-reformation era (1998–2014) policies of land-use change promoting tourism and environmental conservation. One of these is the introduction of the UNESCO Geopark charter as a tool to realize the image of a modern state and “modernizing” regional economies. In this, a particular patrimonial governance arrangement appears to govern land use distribution to accrue the potential value of land from different use. This particular clientelist order will be analyzed in this article, namely by examining how finance, state power, and informal interactions between the national and regional structures of governance mesh in arranging land-use conversions for tourism purposes. Based on 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 32 interviews with various stakeholders in the Gunungsewu and Ciletuh UNESCO Geoparks, the paper will show how Indonesian post-reformation decentralization policies induced regional clientelism in the production of tourism destinations. This includes hierarchical relations between the local elite, private business owners, and governments representing asymmetric loyalty relations, negotiated subordination, and dominance. The more recent re-centralization attempts from the national government under Joko Widodo’s regime seem only to encourage this clientelism as a form of resistance to the state. This evidences that the Indonesian patrimonial governance and the production of tourism destinations in geoparks run counter to the ideals in governance as promoted for destination development