Analysis of the conflicts between development preferences and spatial differences at the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces World Heritage Site based on participatory mapping

Nanshu Zhou ^* Yibo An Yachan Wang Chenhong Jing Honglian Hua

• Faculty of Geography, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, China

The scientific identification and analysis of potential conflicts in the development preferences of heritage sites are highly important for not only clarifying the interests and demands of different stakeholders toward heritage sites but also analyzing the harmony of human-environment interactions at heritage sites and alleviating the negative impact of development preferences on the sustainable development of heritage sites. This study takes the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces World Heritage Site in Honghe Prefecture as an example and, combined with the conceptual model of conflict potential, adopts participatory mapping (PM) and semistructured interviews to investigate the tourism development attitudes toward and landscape value of the heritage site for three types of stakeholders, namely, local residents, tourists and scholars. The results indicate that (1) attitude density and its differences exhibit a "core edge" characteristic around the tourism loop and are highly correlated with the spatial perception of landscape value. (2) The spatial differences in conflict tendencies are influenced by 4 factors, namely, the influence of tourism development patterns on the importance of locations, the influence of discourse changes in the stakeholder network on attitudinal differences, the influence of social status changes in multiscale power processes on attitudinal differences, and the influence of diverse heritage site images on the importance and attitudinal differences. (3) The spatial distribution of conflict tendency is highly related to the traditional culture of the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces World Heritage Site in Honghe Prefecture and the image of the heritage site, which is reflected in the struggle for social space caused by the difficulty in balancing the "values" and "power relations" among the different interest stakeholders. (4) The application of the combination of PM and semistructured in-depth interviews can effectively obtain subjective perception data of multiple stakeholders, thereby providing technical support and research ideas to help better understand the spatial characteristics of development attitudes and conflict tendencies. The research results provide not only a perspective for revealing the underlying mechanisms of land use conflicts in the protection process but also ideas for the research model of human-environment interactions in the context of cultural landscape heritage sites.