Production of a Tourist Space and Territorial Governance Regime in French Guiana (Guyane Française)—The Challenges of Touristification in the Peripheral Territory of Haut-Maroni

Abstract

This article focuses on the processes of territorialization of the local population’s living space, created by the governance regime in French Guiana, and their effects on the production of a tourist space in the context of sparsely populated regions. The Guiana Amazonian Park is analyzed as a territorialization agent with mechanisms that influence the development of tourism in the Maripasoula/Haut-Maroni zone. Our objective is to use the territorial framework to better understand the political and geographical dynamics that exist between the processes of the global production of tourist areas and those related to the local population’s management of the living space. Using Critical political geography framework, this study is based on documentary research and on 15 semi-directed interviews, conducted during a month-long stay in 2019, with different groups of stakeholders involved directly or indirectly in tourist activities. The paper first outlines the regional and local context of tourism in French Guiana. It also offers a territorial description of the different inclusion criteria for Sparsely Populated Regions in the Maripasoula/Haut-Maroni region, which is linked to the specific tourist practices in this territory. The processes of territorialization are then analyzed through the different governance regimes the French state created in order to understand how they fit into the production of a tourist space. Finally, a reflection on the future of tourism in this region is proposed, particularly regarding colonial governance regimes vis-à-vis Indigenous populations in the region. Our analysis demonstrates that tourism, along with any other form of activity to be developed in Maripasoula/Haut-Maroni territory, will be systematically confronted with the same structural constraints that have helped to reproduce the dynamics of territorial dispossession since the establishment of a colonial regime in the region.