Mountains, Heritage, and Tourism: Global Pasts and Global Futures

Abstract

Since the Rio Earth Summit in the early 1990s, the relevance of mountains to global climate change and development agendas has increasingly been formalized in international policy. This has had implications for the management of heritage and tourism, and particularly gender justice and Indigenous rights for mountain peoples. This chapter reviews the complex intersections of these debates as they play out in global-local policy. It begins with a brief review of the history of mountain tourism before turning to consider how (and when) mountains emerged as a form of ‘global heritage’ in need of protection and conservation. The chapter then homes in on mountain futures, placing particular emphasis on three discussion points: gender, climate change, and Indigenous-led interventions.