Are National Parks Inherently Unequal? the Reform to Parks and Its First Application in Metropolitan France

In France, many conflicts have marked the genesis of national parks enabled by the Law of 1960, right up to the blocking of their creation or had a lasting effect on their existence (Larrère 2009). In an attempt to overcome the local resistance that inevitably accompanies having a natural site classified as a national park, the French government passed a new Law (2006) which grants greater power to local elected representatives, explicitly recognizes the rights and knowledge of local users, and invites them to participate in actually defining the park project.

Our research into the creation of the new Calanques National Park, however, points up that the application of these new principles actually reinforces the environmental inequality that they were meant to reduce. How should we interpret this apparent paradox? The goal of this paper is to outline the interacting processes at work in the park’s creation that exacerbated local environmental inequalities. We will look at both the weight of procedures and the more structural factors behind such inequality.

We will show how the consultation procedures adopted tend to reproduce the asymmetry of the public sphere (in the Habermasian sense) that developed throughout the 20^th century around the protection of the Calanques. They as such helped institutionalize in the park project the dominant norms through whose lens certain uses seen as “worthy of a park”, whereas others are downgraded. In a related phenomenon, the new National Park label has re-increased the environmental value of the surrounding neighbourhoods, further boosting their new appeal. This process has even affected the poorest areas and led to a relocation of the most economically distressed populations outside the site, meaning far from the natural amenities that had formed the bases of their living conditions and leisure activities.