The promises of conservation: Producing nature on Jeju Island, South Korea, through designated areas

Jeju Special Self-Governing Province (Jeju Province), South Korea, is an archipelagic province that is unsurpassed worldwide for its number of IDAs. These designations, alongside the national park, have transformed relationships with nature, promising international prestige and environmentally friendly development. Through discourse analysis and interviews with policymakers, provincial officials, village heads, ecotourism consultants, and site guides, this thesis interrogates the role of Designated Areas (DAs) in producing nature in various distinct ways in the province. This production entangles nature further in dominant socio-economic processes through various ecotourism projects that propagate ideologies of nature specific to the present and historical eras. Particularly due to the country’s recent liminal existence as a rising economy, South Korea, as part of the wider East Asian region, has sometimes been overlooked by political ecologists who have focused on developing and, more recently, advanced economies. This thesis additionally adds to the literature on ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002) by identifying the role of domestic structures and institutions in propagating market-oriented DA governance alongside norm-disseminating international networks. Rather than producing nature in a singular form, the national park and IDAs raise tensions around value and usage reflecting the adoption of neoliberalisation elsewhere. Through the national park designation campaign in the 1960s and the IDA campaigns in the 2000s, designation advocates pledged to bring prosperity and nature-friendly development to the province. The legacies of developmentalism are particularly evident in the use of market-oriented ecotourism projects to activate nature through technocratic interventions. Socio-economic flux and the remnants of developmentalism produce a form of ecotourism that is brand-oriented yet functions to build community cohesion and reconnect villagers with nature following rapid social change. Despite the limited success of these brand-oriented ecotourism programmes, however, far from challenging unsustainable development, they exist in complementarity with it.