Local Businesses as Boundary Actors in Biosphere Reserves: Capturing the Potential of Business Stakeholders to Communicate and Mediate Biocultural Heritage Tourism Values

This paper examines the interrelationships between Biosphere Reserves and tourism businesses in the only urban UNESCO Biosphere Reserve (BR) in the United Kingdom, ‘The Living Coast’ (Brighton and Lewes Downs BR). The scope for the role of tourism business stakeholders as ‘boundary actors’ (Guston 2001; Kim and Branwell 2019, Kirsop-Taylor and Russell 2022) is explored, both conceptually and practically, whereby the spatiality of the biosphere both hosts and frames the sustainable activities encouraged within it. Here we conceptualise the key boundaries as those between science, policy, and implementation (hence also including businesses, communities, and visitors) as well as the spatial boundaries inherent in the BR (core area, buffer zones and transition areas) which enable sustainable development approaches to be trialled within the BR boundary. We highlight how tourism businesses act as mediators who convey the values of the biosphere (i.e. sustainable development), or indeed, through a series of processes, are encouraged to align with them for reciprocity of benefits. Nature-based protected areas, such as national parks may find it easier to brand themselves as environmentally sustainable places (Aschenbrand & Michler 2021), while urban BRs often face complex realities around economic and social challenges. The Living Coast BR in Sussex, southern England, encapsulates rural countryside, the city of Brighton and Hove, and a coastal zone, extending from the shore two kilometres out to sea. Its topographic diversity and spatially uneven development present unique characteristics that work as a useful ‘living lab’ through which to explore the challenges that natural and cultural heritage-based tourism or Biocultural Heritage (BCH) tourism faces in relation to policy, practice, and strategic destination development.
This paper examines: (i) how to engage with Biocultural Heritage tourism businesses (businesses for whom nature and heritage is a central part of the their value proposition) to promote awareness of the BR’s values, and thereby communicate those values, in turn, to their visitors; (ii) the role of BCHT businesses in curating ‘images of place’ for both place-keeping and practical, value-led biosphere reserve destination marketing in an urban BR; and (iii) the potential for positioning biosphere reserves as ‘living labs’ whereby tourism businesses drive responsible enterprise behaviour change through the creation of a dynamic suite of best practices. Tourism businesses perform in collaboration with a geographically diverse space and other stakeholders, as boundary actors - communicating values, actions, imagery and visitor experiences within and outside the space itself. Bedoya (2012) emphasises the importance of place-keeping, which is of particular relevance to BCHT, noting that places evolve with time – ‘making’ what they need (infrastructure, development, technology) and ‘keeping’ what they value (culture, heritage, traditions). BRs offer a useful way to examine the interplay between protected space, tourism potential and the actors that move within and through the boundaries of that space.
This paper discusses work conducted in the Brighton and Lewes Downs BR during a four year European-funded regional development project investigating the potential for expanding BCHT in four BRs in England and France (Price et al. 2022, Wilkinson et al. 2022, Wilkinson and Coles 2023). Tourism businesses in the realm of ‘biocultural heritage’ (Wilkinson, 2019) were defined and classified in the biosphere region for the research sample, in collaboration with the destination management organisation. For awareness-building, they were invited to participate in knowledge-exchange and networking events about the BR, including the creation of a ‘BCHT Academy.’ Subsequently, resources were co-created between the research team, BR staff and businesses at various stages of the project to help businesses align with the biosphere ethos. These resources included a toolkit (containing images and text they could use in marketing), a series of tourist/visitor personas (informed from a large visitor survey), a range of prototype visitor experiences (developed by biosphere staff and tourism experts), and a cross-border business charter with examples of actions they could take. Interviews and coaching sessions were also undertaken with 11 businesses in the Living Coast over the duration of 18 months to closer align them with the ethos of this biosphere. The aim of these combined methodologies was the sequential delivery of biosphere reserve value-communication, engagement, application/uptake of those values and co-creative destination development at multiple scales: businesses, biosphere reserve, and the tourism authority.
This paper reports on the experiences and challenges of co-developing tourism products in the Living Coast BR with tourism businesses. Key results show that, by working collaboratively with and creating appropriate materials and messaging to businesses, they can become key boundary actors in helping to (co-)promote the ideals and missions of destinations directly to visitors. Practical outcomes of the research resulted in the creation of a BCH tourism business directory, a master-planning toolkit (decision-support tool for tourism sustainability), and a tangible, digital asset repository of professional images, text, and films to be used by BCHT businesses and the DMO for wider BR destination marketing. The researchers (and an artist) created high-impact visual pictorials to communicate three future scenarios to enhance understanding of engagement/non-engagement for businesses with biosphere values: ‘Business as Usual’, ‘Custodianship’ or ‘No-Control, Profit-Led’. Buy-in for responsible tourism enterprise lies at the heart of the ethos of this research and wider BCHT project itself.
Consistent with a living labs approach, the research demonstrates the usefulness of an experimental approach to collaborative BCH tourism implementation (using a suite of different business support, marketing and messaging materials) for increasing buy-in from the business community regarding sustainability and promoting biocultural heritage assets (place-keeping). In this way, businesses play a role as key boundary actors who are in direct communication with visitors and can communicate key sustainability and BR values and messages through their practices and activities (placemaking). The impact of this research speaks to new ways of positioning BRs as ‘living labs’ for tourism businesses. Protected area status, through BR designation, offers enhanced sustainable tourism potential through value-aligned destination marketing. This potential can only begin to be enacted through engagement with the right tourism businesses who deliver products, services, and experiences to visitors from within and outside the borders of the bounded space itself. Boundary actors can therefore absorb, communicate, and produce biospheres’ sustainability agendas if structures and processes enable them to do so.