The category of mountain as source of legitimacy for national parks

ENVSCI-1383; No. of Pages 9 environmental science & policy xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

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The category of mountain as source of legitimacy for national parks Isabelle Arpin *, Arnaud Cosson Irstea – UR DTGR, 2 rue de la Papeterie BP 76, F-38402 Saint-Martin d’He`res cedex, France

article info

abstract

Article history:

This article aims to show that the category of mountain has been a useful resource for

Received 9 April 2014

justifying that national parks be major instruments for environmental knowledge and

Received in revised form

action throughout their history. The first part relates how mountain national parks became

11 June 2014

major tools for nature conservation. We describe the shift that took place during the era of

Accepted 8 July 2014

nature conservation, from a register of representativeness (mountains as miniatures of the

Available online xxx

globe) to a register of exceptionality (mountains as the last refuges for remarkable species and ecosystems). The second part presents the changes that accompanied the emergence

Keywords:

and rise of the notion of biodiversity and how these changes undermined the exceptionality

Mountain

register of legitimacy and raised sharp criticism against national parks. The third part shows

National parks

how mountain national parks’ managers sought to respond to this criticism by associating a

Legitimacy

new register of legitimacy (sensitivity) to the category of mountain (mountains as sentinels

Biodiversity

in a rapidly changing globe) and combining it with previous registers of legitimacy (repre-

Knowledge

sentativeness and exceptionality). Focusing on scientific programmes recently carried out in French national parks, we identify two complementary means of mixing these three registers of legitimacy. We conclude by characterizing the category of mountain as a long-standing, situated and constructed resource that requires social skills and competences to be maintained over time. # 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1.

Introduction

National parks were often created in mountains or rugged environments. For instance, the only Swiss national park was established in a very mountainous area in 1914 (Kupper, 2012). In Italy, the two first national parks, the Gran Paradiso national park (GPNP) and the Abruzzo national park, were also created in mountain ranges in the 1920s. In France, the first embryo of national park was created just before WWI in the Pelvoux massif (Zuanon, 1995). With the exception of the Port-Cros national park, all first French national parks were created from

the 1960s onwards in mountain ranges: three in the Alps, one in the Massif Central, and one in the Pyreneans (Merveilleux du Vignaux, 2003). The over-representation of national parks in mountainous areas remains true these days (Debarbieux et al., 2000; Araujo et al., 2011: 488), albeit to a lesser extent. But the important shifts over the last decades from an era of nature conservation to an era of biodiversity management (Blandin, 2009) have challenged the legitimacy of national parks as major policy tools. This raises several questions: why have national parks and more generally protected areas been disproportionately created in mountains? How have their managers coped with

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 476762739; fax: +33 476513803. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (I. Arpin), [email protected] (A. Cosson). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2014.07.005 1462-9011/# 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Arpin, I., Cosson, A., The category of mountain as source of legitimacy for national parks. Environ. Sci. Policy (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2014.07.005

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the shifts from nature conservation to biodiversity management and sought to justify that mountain national parks remain major tools for environmental science and policy? Practical reasons might come to mind to answer the first question. It was undeniably easier to create national parks in areas with fewer and dwindling human activities such as mountains than in densely populated and economically active regions. Yet, the projects to create the Pelvoux national park in the 1910s (Zuanon, 1995), the GPNP in the 1920s (Hardenberg, 2011) and the Mercantour national park in the 1970s (Merveilleux du Vignaux, 2003) did generate very harsh opposition from the local populations. We intend to show that the over-representation of national parks in mountains has another and less obvious explanation: the category of mountain was turned into a very powerful and enduring resource to legitimize mountain national parks (Debarbieux and Rudaz, 2014 [2010]). We found Gieryn’s work on the notion of ‘truth-spot’ to be very inspiring here. Gieryn (2002, 2006) defines a truth-spot as a delimited geographical location that lends credibility to claims. A place can be defined as a truth-spot if the knowledge that is produced in it, which is inevitably situated (Haraway, 1988), can escape ‘‘into the space of universal knowledge’’. Gieryn shows that this capacity rests on characteristics that are attached to places and connect them to truth. These characteristics vary from one case to the next; moreover, they can be combined to turn a particular place into a truth-spot. For instance, Thoreau constructed Walden Pond as a celebrated truth-spot by associating to it four place-based registers of authenticity: nativity, solitude, typicality, and unsulliedness. Gieryn concentrated his attention on specific knowledge production sites, such as Walden Pond, an Indian Institute of Plant Industry, a molecular biology laboratory, the city of Chicago, etc. We propose to extend the notion of truth-spot in two ways. First, we believe that it can be applied not only to specific places but also to generic places, i.e. places that are lumped together in the same category, such as that of mountain. These places are connected to truth by attributes that were used to construct a given category (about the construction of mountain as a category, see Debarbieux, 2004; Debarbieux and Rudaz, 2014 [2010]). Indeed, it is not only a particular mountain, island or lake that have loomed large in the work and research sites of natural scientists, but mountains, lakes and islands as categories (Drouin, 1991; Reidy, 2011). Second, Gieryn’s thinking on the where of science can be extended to the where of action. Places can be connected to efficiency in the same way as they can be connected to truth. They are then turned into ‘efficiency-spots’, that is sites where the actions taken can be featured as having a particularly far-reaching influence. We contend that mountains have been defined both as truth- and efficiency-spots where environmental knowledge should be produced and action taken in priority; and that this has been possible through the attachment of several registers of legitimacy to the category of mountain, which has thus become a useful and enduring resource for environmental knowledge and action. The outline of the article is as follows. The first part stages how mountain national parks became major tools for nature conservation. We describe the shift that took place during the

era of nature conservation, from a register of representativeness (mountains as miniatures of the globe) to a register of exceptionality (mountains as the last refuges for remarkable species and ecosystems). The second part presents the changes that accompanied the emergence and rise of the notion of biodiversity and how these changes undermined the exceptionality register of legitimacy and raised sharp criticism against national parks. The third part shows how mountain national parks’ managers sought to respond to this criticism by associating a new register of legitimacy (sensitivity) to the category of mountain (mountains as sentinels in a rapidly changing globe) and combining it, to a certain extent, with previous registers of legitimacy (representativeness and exceptionality). Focusing on scientific programmes recently carried out in French national parks, we identify two complementary means of mixing these three registers of legitimacy. We conclude by characterizing the category of mountain as a resource that has enabled national parks to remain major tools for environmental knowledge and action in two successive eras.

2. Mountain national parks as a major tool for nature conservation 2.1. Mountain as unsullied miniature of the globe: the representativeness register as a basis for the creation of national parks The late 19th century was marked by rising awareness of damages to nature and an increasing will to protect it. Protected areas appeared as a major policy tool to achieve this goal. And national parks were among the oldest, largest, most highly protected and most famous protected areas. They occupy a prominent place in the IUCN typology of protected areas (category II out of VI). At this stage, it is necessary to consider how the category of mountain was elaborated by natural scientists and, in particular, the inventors of biogeography. (A) Humboldt deserves a special mention here: his five-year exploration of South America enabled him to show that mountains can be considered microcosms (Debarbieux, 2012). Humboldt’s work was continued and refined by Hooker in the Himalayas (Reidy, 2011). Hooker confirmed the possibility of studying the distribution of vegetation types across the globe by investigating relatively small mountainous areas rather than by covering very large areas from low to high latitudes. Therefore, mountains could stand as miniatures of the globe and be defined as sites of global representation (Bigg et al., 2009; Aubin, 2009; Vetter, 2011). The high diversity of plant and animal species was one of the key assets identified by natural scientists for the creation of the Swiss national park, along with the relatively large size of the area and its pristine character (Kupper, 2012: 184–185). In the US, biological and geological representativeness was an explicit criterion to select tracts of land to be protected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Shafer, 1999: 191–192). For instance, the Ecological Society of America stressed that many typical stages of forests were represented in Glacier Bay to promote its preservation for science (Rumore, 2012).

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What held for natural sciences also held for nature conservation. The promoters of national parks could argue that it would be more efficient to conserve nature in mountainous areas than on the same surface of low-land areas, since ‘‘High mountains host more biological richness per unit of conserved land-area than any other terrestrial system’’ (Ko¨rner, 2004: 17). The concentration of species and vegetation types was a powerful rationale in favour of the creation of mountain national parks. Another important result of scientific investigations was that mountains had served as refuges for many species that had disappeared elsewhere, including species regarded as remarkable by nature conservationists.

2.2. A gradual shift in the register of legitimacy: from representativeness to exceptionality A gradual shift took place from the initial register of representativeness to the register of exceptionality. The alpine ibex is a conspicuous example here. This large ungulate had only survived in the Gran Paradiso range, where the Italian ‘‘hunter kings’’ had created large hunting reserves. The will to protect the ibex was crucial to the creation of the GPNP in 1922 (Buffault, 1929: 520) and, four decades later, to that of the first French national park, in the Vanoise range (Mauz, 2003). There are two main reasons for this shift: the specific culture of conservation public policies and the concrete difficulty to implement them in areas that are inhabited, even if sparsely so. Indeed, the everyday reality of national parks was constructed by staff for whom work and passion were tightly entangled (Granjou et al., 2010). They were committed to nature conservation as individuals rather than as participants in a collective action designed at the national park’s level. In many cases, the action of national parks was performed by field staff that were remote from the institution’s headquarters and relatively autonomous in the definition of their everyday tasks. During several decades they dedicated most of their efforts to inventorying and monitoring their favourite species, which were mainly ‘‘remarkable’’ species. The second reason for the shift towards the register of exceptionality is related to the type of governance (Stoker, 1998; Le Gale`s, 1999; Goxe, 2007) that was concretely implemented to address the issues raised by the difficult embedment of conservation policies in inhabited areas. This governance was characterized by the following recurrent interplays between groups of actors: avoidance, conflict, agreement over vague choices, and dramatization, i.e. theatrical stances staging an opposition between ‘‘protecting flowers and critters’’ and supporting local populations often facing development difficulties (Cosson, 2014). Thus, the creation of the French mountain national parks generally led to the constitution of two starkly contrasting worlds: the world of nature conservation in the core zone of the park, and the world of local development in the buffer zone. This contrast soon became particularly striking and led to a state of constant tension in the Vanoise range where the national park created in the early 1960s was surrounded by a set of very large ski resorts with a booming touristic economy (Mauz, 2013). Restricted to a narrow core zone by the other actors, the

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institution responsible for the park management and its staff constructed an obsidional identity based on the notion of exceptionality. All the national parks’ specificities, concerning their fauna, flora, their national status in a local territory, their regulatory mandate in an area of common law, or their longterm missions and perspective in a short-term oriented society, were considered positively within the parks, and their legitimacy became more and more anchored in the register of exceptionality. Exceptionality also underpinned the forms of soft tourism that national parks sought to foster. Thus, national parks were disproportionately created in mountainous areas not only because it was easier to establish them in remote places, but also because the scientific investigation of mountains had provided national park promoters with powerful rationales to legitimize mountain national parks in an age of nature conservation: first with the register of representativeness, then with the register of exceptionality. But the emergence of the notions of climate change and biodiversity challenged their relevance.

3. The shift from nature conservation to biodiversity stewardship, a challenge to the national parks’ policy relevance 3.1.

Rising concerns over biodiversity and climate change

The term biodiversity was coined in the mid 1980s by a group of American biology conservationists and then popularized by the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (Takacs, 1996). A number of characteristics have been attached to it, and have contributed to the framing of the notion. We shall identify four characteristics that have exerted strong influence on the status of national parks as truth- and efficiency-spots. First, biodiversity encompasses all life forms and organization levels. Everything that has to do with life is part of biodiversity, whether this thing is a gene, a species, an ecosystem, a landscape or the relation between any of these, whether it is tame or wild, urban or rural, dead or alive. Biodiversity is thus an all-encompassing notion, with the notable exception of invasive species. Furthermore, biodiversity is a multi-faceted notion: while taxonomic biodiversity (i.e. the diversity of species) has long been on the front-stage, other facets of biodiversity – functional diversity, i.e. the diversity of the functions performed by ecosystems; phylogenetic diversity, which corresponds to an approach to biodiversity that takes into account the evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms, and genetic diversity – also matter in the capacity to adapt to changing environments. All these facets must be taken into account as they only partly coincide with one another (Devictor et al., 2010). Second, biodiversity and humans have ambivalent relationships. Humans are considered to be part of biodiversity, which was not necessarily the case with nature. But the relationships between biodiversity and humans are described as highly ambivalent. On the one hand, human activities are accused of being the major cause of current biodiversity loss and are seen as essentially harmful to biodiversity. On the other hand, some activities are also believed to benefit biodiversity. These may be traditional activities that create

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or maintain habitats hosting rare species (for instance through extensive grazing), or activities relating to animal and plant selection creating new varieties, or modern and science-based activities such as ecological engineering. As regards the role of biodiversity in human life, it is depicted as largely positive. Its bright side (e.g. pollinators) is much more frequently envisaged than its dark side (e.g. species responsible for serious diseases or competing with humans). Biodiversity appears as something that humans appreciate and that contributes to their quality of life. It is actually much more than a question of quality of life. Biodiversity has been framed as simply indispensable to humanity: human life on earth would be impossible without a minimum amount of biodiversity. Thresholds are unknown but there is a clear threat that humans could well be among the species to become extinct if biodiversity were to collapse. Third, biodiversity is framed as the provisional and threatened outcome of a complex and agitated history. This history is characterized by a series of extinction crises and slow recoveries. What therefore counts is to address biodiversity dynamically, by retracing its past evolution and predicting its future, rather than describing a particular state of biodiversity, at a given time. The hypothesis that biodiversity is currently undergoing a 6th extinction crisis is regularly put forward. From a sociological perspective, this hypothesis can be analyzed as an ‘‘essential fiction’’. This concept was offered by the American sociologist Gusfield (1980) to refer to the way in which scientists transform a complex, poorly known and ambiguous reality into a simplified and clear message capable of convincing decision makers to take action. The term ‘‘fiction’’ indicates that the message has been elaborated through a series of selection and simplification operations and so is not entirely true to reality. The term ‘‘essential’’ means that these operations are indispensable if scientists are to convince decision makers and the general public that a situation deemed problematic needs to be changed. Fourth, we know little but still enough to take action. There is a certain amount of tension regarding biodiversity knowledge. One common claim is that we know enough to say that biodiversity is jeopardized and that we should take urgent action to halt its loss. Another common claim is that biodiversity is shockingly poorly known and that we must urgently explore it, if only to discover what is doomed to become extinct. The emergence and rapid diffusion of the notion of biodiversity has exerted strong influence on the work of ecologists and nature managers. Over the years, it has become clear that managing a national park in an era of nature conservation and in an era of biodiversity loss are two different things. The general goal has shifted from nature conservation, marked by the exceptionality register, to biodiversity management or biodiversity ‘‘stewardship’’ (Blandin, 2009), marked by new registers of legitimacy. In particular, the idea has gained ground that in addition to providing sustainable management of habitats and ecosystems, effective conservation strategies need to detect and mitigate impacts of climate change (Araujo et al., 2011: 484), considered the ‘‘biggest external threat’’ to national parks (Shafer, 2014: 28). This challenges national parks and particularly mountain national parks.

3.2.

National parks facing criticism

The four aforementioned characteristics of biodiversity have weakened the legitimacy of national parks both as truth spots and as efficiency-spots. The all-encompassing dimension of biodiversity, and the rise of functional and phylogenetic approaches beyond the classical taxonomic approach, have turned exceptionality into a weakness rather than an asset: parks are being reproached with having a narrow vision of biodiversity rather than ‘‘taking care of ordinary nature’’ (Mougenot, 2003), with being remote and isolated places whereas what is currently needed is wildlife corridors and more broadly better land use planning to enhance habitat connectivity and facilitate the move of species and their adaptation to rapid global changes (Shafer, 2014), and with adopting a static approach to nature and a top-down approach to nature conservation. They therefore appear to be rather illadapted to the will to fight biodiversity loss. The strong interdependence between biodiversity and human activities goes together with the general evolution of public policies, i.e. the shift from government to governance (Le Gale`s, 1995; Duran and Thoenig, 1996). This procedural turn and the deliberative imperative (Blondiaux and Sintomer, 2002) respond to the evolution of nature conservation from a segregation paradigm to an integration paradigm (Philipps, 2004; Mose, 2007), or even to a post-integration paradigm revolving around the notion of ecological solidarity (Thompson et al., 2011). For instance, deputee Giran’s report (2003), which prepared the 2006 French law reforming national parks, underlined that the national park’s policies met its goals only when the remote character of mountainous areas enabled to meet them (return of the wolf, success of reintroductions), but not in more complex domains demanding the evolution of practices towards a collective cooperative action (preservation of landscapes, pastoralism, etc.). Such examples allowed to conclude, along with scientists, that ‘‘protected areas are trying harder where threat is lower’’ (Joppa and Pfaff, 2009) and to point to a location bias: protected areas and national parks in particular have been situated ‘‘high and far’’ in areas unlikely to face habitat alteration even in the absence of protection (Mora and Sale, 2011: 253). Moreover, the complexity and unpredictability of biodiversity also contribute to fuelling the critical statement that protected areas (PAs) have failed to prevent biodiversity loss: ‘‘PA failure may be more the rule than the exception’’ (Mora and Sale, 2011). The contrast between a sharp rise in the terrestrial and marine area covered by PAs in the last decades and the ongoing loss of biodiversity, leads to the conclusion that ‘‘the continuing effort to establish PAs is not coping with the challenge of falling global biodiversity’’. The shift from nature conservation to the dynamic management of biodiversity raises the thorny issue of evaluation, which becomes more pressing with the rise of ‘‘new public management’’. In a context of scientific uncertainty about the measure of biodiversity evolution and given the intricate interactions between its multiple factors, focusing on symbolic and allegedly exceptional spaces such as national parks might be a tempting solution, but this means making them, at least partially, the scapegoats of a collective failure.

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Finally, the fact that biodiversity knowledge is defined as limited but nevertheless sufficient to take action destabilizes the relationships between knowledge and action in national parks. Their managers are pushed by the need for pragmatism and efficiency which is also stressed by ‘‘new public management’’. Exceptionality has ceased to be a reason for favouring knowledge production without attending to efficiency. On the contrary, it becomes a demand, in terms of governance, to shift to collective action and implement a scientific monitoring to constantly readjust this action. Science is not an unquestioned source of truth anymore, and knowledge has ceased to be the basis for top-down decisions. They become important means for a ‘‘careful action in a complex situation’’ (Callon et al., 2009 [2001]). This is typically the case of the management of the lakes’ stocking in the Mercantour national park, to which we shall come back later. It must be noted that there is an ongoing academic debate among ecologists over the value of PAs to mitigate climate change. For instance, Thomas et al. (2012) contend that current PAs remain valuable for conservation as they are disproportionately colonized by species expanding into new regions. But what is of interest to us here is that, with rising concerns over biodiversity loss and climate change, the relevance of the category of mountain and, consequently, the relevance of national parks as a major tool for nature policies has ceased to be obvious and must be (re)demonstrated. In the next section, we show that mountain as a category is, again, a potential resource for national parks to remain a major policy tool in an age of biodiversity loss and climate change.

4. Mountain national parks as a major tool for biodiversity stewardship in an age of global changes The previous section has shown that exceptionality has ceased to be a sufficient register of legitimacy for national parks. Other registers of legitimacy are needed if national parks are to remain an important tool for environmental knowledge and action in an age of biodiversity stewardship and global changes. Here again the category of mountain proves to be an important resource, as it enables the park managers to put forward a new register of legitimacy, that of global sensitivity, without entirely giving up the representativeness and exceptionality registers. Drawing on the case of programmes recently or currently carried out in French alpine national parks, we show that national park managers seek to combine these different registers of legitimacy in two complementary ways. One way is to design programmes that, to a certain extent, mix the three registers, as in the case of the sentinel alpine pastures (SAP) programme. Another way is to carry out several programmes in which different registers of legitimacy dominate. For instance, the Ecrins and Mercantour national parks have embarked on so-called sentinel programmes, where the sensitivity register stands out, and inventory programmes, where it is the exceptionality and representativeness registers remain important. We learned about these programmes as members of the scientific councils of the Vanoise and Mercantour national

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parks and of the French Alps’ Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) site that gathers together natural and social scientists, nature managers and representatives of farming activities (see Lavorel et al., 2013). These programmes were regularly presented during the meetings of the scientific councils and of the LTSER site. This gave us a basic knowledge of these programmes and their evolution, which we completed through a literature review and repeated discussions with their promoters. Moreover, we carried out an in-depth study of the ATBI programme in 2010–2011, notably based on a set of semi-structured interviews with participants in the programme and on field observations (for a detailed description of our method and findings, see Granjou et al., 2014).

4.1. The SAP programme: combining registers of legitimacy within one programme The sentinel alpine pastures (SAP) programme is a telling example of the national park managers’ current efforts to demonstrate that parks are still useful and relevant to environmental knowledge and action in an age of biodiversity loss and climate change. It was designed as an intrinsically mountain programme, explicitly presenting mountains as a particularly propitious place to investigate how species, ecosystems and farming systems respond to climate change, i.e. as ‘‘a climate change laboratory’’ (Franc¸ois et al., 2010). The SAP programme was born in the E´crins national park after a period (2003–2005) of severe and repeated droughts. It was tested on two pastures in 2007 and officially launched in 2008–2009 (Dobremez et al., forthcoming). It was then extended to the Vanoise national park in 2011, and Vercors and Chartreuse regional natural parks in 2012 and 2013. At the time of writing, 24 pastures were monitored every year. The aim is to collect and record long-term data about climate, plant diversity, pastoral practices, and the farming system. For instance, the dynamic of snow melting on the pastures is monitored based on satellite images; the pasture biomass is evaluated drawing on the measure of the plant height at the bottom and at the top of the pasture; climate data are collected at a very local scale and pastoral practices are recorded throughout the grazing season. This implies the involvement of scientists from several disciplines (ecology, climate science, and agronomy)1 as well as different types of practitioners (protected area managers, specialists of alpine pasture management, farmers and shepherds). It is therefore an interand transdisciplinary programme. The very name of the SAP programme suggests that major attention is paid to sensitivity. Indeed, the term ‘‘sentinel’’ is borrowed from the epidemiology field and refers to the early warning dimension of the programme. As was already the case in the past, mountains here are considered to provide scientists with ‘‘enhanced environments’’ (Bigg et al., 2009: 317). The ecologists involved in the programme have contributed to showing that mountain species are particularly 1

The scientists involved are principally ecologists from the Alpine Ecology Lab and agronomists from the ‘Development of Mountain Territories’ research unit of Irstea. Both labs are located in Grenoble.

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sensitive to climate change (Thuiller et al., 2005). They seek to forecast how these species and their habitats will respond to climate change in a more or less remote future. Ecologists having studied the sensitivity of mountain ecosystems to climate change contend that action is needed to mitigate effects of climate change on alpine florae (Engler et al., 2011). In line with this, the promoters of the SAP programme insist that it goes beyond the goals of an observatory and that interventions are possible if needed. And they add that this is an ‘‘important measure given the importance of mountain pastures, an exceptional ecological and cultural heritage considered by the IPCC’s experts to be very vulnerable to climate change. These milieus are also crucial to very many farming systems of the Alps and Provence: around one fourth of the cattle and three quarters of the sheep of these areas go to mountain pastures’’ (Dobremez et al., 2013: 37). The previous quote suggests that the register of exceptionality is also present. However, the SAP programme does not particularly focus on exceptional species or spaces. What is above all presented as exceptional in the SAP programme is the partnership established between different groups of actors. The programme’s promoters portray it as a successful co-construction process: ‘‘the discussions [following the droughts] led to a consensus on the definition of the mountain pasture as both a place with shared stakes facing the announced consequences of climate change and involving the joint responsibility of farmers and park managers, and as a major site for collaborative observation and intervention’’ (Dobremez et al., forthcoming). The will was to elaborate simple, robust and reproducible protocols that non-scientists could implement. Members of the alpine ecology lab trained staff of the protected areas to collect data about pasture biomass. Moreover, farmers and shepherds were invited to record and report the changes they might observe, such as the arrival of a new plant species, unusual times of blossoming, etc. And shepherds were provided with rain gauges. A meeting with each shepherd takes place at the end of the grazing season and an annual meeting is organized with farmers about their farming system to discuss the data and hypotheses. In that sense, the SAP programme can be related to citizen science initiatives. The SAP programme fits well with most characteristics of biodiversity that we mentioned earlier: it is dynamic, bottom up rather than top-down; it does not rule out interventions if observations lead to the conclusion that the pastures and their biodiversity are evolving in a manner considered to be unsatisfactory. Through such a programme, national park managers can hope to demonstrate their capacity to contribute to the knowledge and stewardship of biodiversity in an age of climate change. The category of mountain provided them with an important rhetorical resource as it enabled them to simultaneously define their territory as sites where changes and adaptation strategies can be detected at an early stage, where exceptional partnerships between different groups of actors can be established, that are representative of a great variety of interactions between ecosystems, climatic conditions and farming systems, and where action should be taken in priority. In other words, it enabled them to construct the parks as truth- and efficiency-spots.

It is important to note that the national parks’ managers alone could not have achieved this. They had to establish relationships with new types of ecologists, notably functional ecologists and modelling ecologists (see Mauz and Granjou, 2013), convince researchers to organize training sessions, and farmers and shepherds to get involved in the programme. Given the different and sometimes contradictory perspectives and interests of these different groups, this was by no means granted and required the patient construction of trust relationships. For that matter, the managers were not equally successful in the different protected areas. The partnerships were easier to establish in the E´crins national park, where tight collaborations between farmers and the park managers had long been established.

4.2. Combining different registers of legitimacy through different programmes Naturalist inventories have been performed in national parks since their creation but they often focused on specific taxa. A new stage recently appeared with the emergence of all taxa biodiversity inventories (ATBI) that aim to inventory as many species as possible in a given area (Mauz, 2011). The first European ATBI was performed in the Mercantour national park (Granjou et al., 2014). As the SAP programme, the Mercantour ATBI was staged as a mountain programme. For instance, the special issue of the park’s magazine about the ATBI2 stated that ‘‘our territory goes from the sea to an elevation of 3000 m in 40 km as the crow flies, hence a high endemism’’ and the then newly elected chair of the park’s management board wrote in the same issue: ‘‘It [this inventory] highlights the unique assets and richness of our mountains’’. The bulk of the inventory was carried out from 2005 to 2012. What comes first, here, is not sensitivity but exceptionality and notably natural exceptionality. The Mercantour range is commonly featured as a major hotspot of Mediterranean biodiversity because of its geological context and location at the crossroads of several climatic influences. This was a key rationale to carry out an ATBI in the Mercantour. The ATBI’s promoters also underline the social exceptionality of this initiative that gathered together hundreds of taxonomists from all over Europe, whereas taxonomists are often presented, and present themselves, as particularly ‘individualistic’; moreover, it combined the competences and skills of scientists (taxonomists but also ecologists) and nature managers. The representativeness and sensitivity registers were also present, but to a much lesser extent. Efforts were made to include as many ecosystems as possible, by distributing inventory sites along the park’s north–south gradient. And the programme was initially called ATBI + M, M standing for monitoring. Its promoters claimed that they would investigate the changes in the species’ presence and absence, try to link these changes with climate change, and that this would lead to rethink the park’s conservation policies. This was an attempt to turn the Mercantour national park into both a truth-spot 2

Journal du Mercantour. Un territoire et des hommes. Summer ˚ 9. 2009. N

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and an efficiency-spot. Yet, nearly all the available means were allocated to the inventorying dimension of the programme, to the detriment of its monitoring dimension, so that the sensitivity register of legitimacy remained largely secondary. More recently, the Mercantour national park embarked on another sentinel programme, focusing on lakes. As in the SAP, the goal of this programme is to detect changes and, also, to reinforce partnerships and collaborations with local actors (fishermen, fishing organizations). The park managers intend to foster innovative decision making processes, in which jointly-made decisions to stop stocking some mountain lakes are considered experiments that modify the lakes’ evolutionary trajectories and must be studied in the long term. Simultaneously, the E´crins national park considered carrying out an ATBI, albeit on a smaller scale than in the Mercantour. So, having started with programmes respectively favouring the sensitivity register and the exceptionality and representativeness registers of legitimacy, the two parks ended up with programmes combining all three registers of legitimacy and a strong claim to contribute to environmental knowledge and action alike. This evolution (from sensitivity to exceptionality and representativeness in the case of the E´crins, and from exceptionality and representativeness to sensitivity in the case of the Mercantour) suggests the need for mountain national parks to combine these three registers of legitimacy in order to remain important tools for environmental knowledge and action in an age of biodiversity loss and climate change.

5.

Conclusion

National parks are disproportionately present in mountainous areas. This article has sought to demonstrate that this is not only because their creation was easier in these areas but also because the category of mountain proved to be a powerful resource to assert their legitimacy. Several characteristics of this resource can be identified. It is a long-standing resource: since the creation of national parks, the category of mountain has served as a resource to assert their legitimacy and relevance to knowledge production and action. In an era when the key issue was to conserve remarkable species, the parks’ managers could highlight the richness of mountainous areas in such species: mountains were principally presented as areas of exceptionality. Yet, this register was questioned with rising concerns over biodiversity loss and climate change. The focus on exceptional species and spaces proved unable to respond to these pressing issues and could even appear as a disadvantage. If they wanted to defend the legitimacy of national parks, their managers had to find new registers of legitimacy. By analyzing the case of programmes carried out in French alpine parks, we showed that they once more resorted to the category of mountain, which enabled them to put the register of sensitivity to global changes on the front stage. The strength of the category of mountain lies in its capacity to emphasize different registers of legitimacy over time: mountains have been successively presented as sites of global representativeness, exceptionality, and global

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sensitivity. It has also enabled the park managers to combine these registers of legitimacy, at least to a certain extent. They have restored the register of representativeness that had been somewhat overshadowed by the register of exceptionality. And they have not entirely given up the register of exceptionality notably by extending it to governance issues, underlining a specific capacity to set up collaborative relationships with local actors. In addition, they have continued to allocate important means to the monitoring of a few iconic species. It is a situated resource: we showed that exceptionality was an advantage in an era of nature conservation but could become a disadvantage in an age of biodiversity management and climate change. Correlatively, mountain as a category is not a ready-made resource; it has to be constructed. Mountain national parks do not naturally appear as places suitable to detect and investigate changes and reactions of species and ecosystems to these changes, and to fight biodiversity loss. The case of the sentinel programmes shows that defining mountain national parks as ‘‘the right tools for the job’’ (Clarke and Fujimura, 1992) demands elaborating inter- and transdisciplinary programmes and establishing renewed collaboration between the park managers, those scientists who are interested in global change issues, and the local actors. This takes time and demands social competences and skills. Shifts from one era to the next are moments of both fragility, because the register on which legitimacy is based is questioned, and social innovation, because new registers of legitimacy have to be found and operationalized. We showed that the parks’ managers have succeeded in adapting the registers of legitimacy to their new context of action, despite dwindling financial and human means, notably by extending them from the naturalist domain to the domain of governance, and in combing them, by embarking on several programmes showing different registers of legitimacy at the same time. We hope to have demonstrated that the category of mountain was an important resource to achieve this.

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