Tourism Governance in Mountain Areas in the Anthropocene: Reticular and Polycentric Approaches to Promoting Spatial Justice

The polycrisis that characterises our era of the Anthropocene shows critical issues, leading us to reflect on whether the categories and approaches used up to now for mountain systems are still adequate with respect to the challenges and opportunities of our time. The environmental crisis leads us to reconsider the cen trality of mountain territories in setting up safeguards for environmental and landscape protection, allowing for the guaranteeing of a wealth of essential resources for the life of ecosystems on a regional scale (water, forest, wildlife, etc.) but also for a set of cultural resources of ancient cultural heritage to be rediscovered for promoting new forms of tourism governance. Mountain territories, with a strong landscape and environmental value and an ancient role in the supply of resources for the development of urban areas, are often defined as ‘internal’ and ‘peripheral’ based on the principles of metric distance, travel time, functional abandonment and depopulation with respect to urban centres. This chapter analyses how traditional geographies of centre/periphery and urban/rural relationships have fuelled forms of local governance of mountain areas which do not represent their transcalar value and proposes a method for identifying a methodological approach for new tourism governance in mountain areas based on a multi-stakeholder triple helix model. This model is useful to renounce the vision of their fragility and remoteness and of their monolithic representation to embrace a double reticular and polycentric vision that promotes spatial justice.