What boundary delineation reveals about island evolutionary governance: Multi-level power brokerage in Réunion National Park

This study analyses the creation of La Réunion National Park (2002–2007) as a strategic and competitive political process embedded within a formal conservation planning framework. Drawing on Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT), it shows how boundary delineation functioned as a governance instrument that reconfigured power relations between the French state and the Regional Council within a post-colonial, multi-level European outermost context marked by socio-environmental vulnerability and claims for regional autonomy. Combining GIS-based spatial analysis, archival research, and semi-structured interviews, the study traces the co-evolution of actors, institutions, discourses, knowledge, and material instruments throughout the park’s spatial planning process. Results, structured along five EGT analytical axes, indicate that boundary delineation constituted a strategic governance process rather than a purely technical exercise. Environmental planning emerged as a political arena in which power relations between the French state and the Regional Council were renegotiated. Scientific expertise and digital tools played a central role in legitimising decisions. Simultaneously, they contributed to filtering and hierarchising competing territorial claims. Participatory processes were formally inclusive but tightly managed, enabling consultation without substantially altering predefined outcomes and resulting in limited boundary changes. Finally, despite stated autonomy-oriented objectives, environmental planning contributed to the production of new social and spatial inequalities, highlighting the ambivalent role of conservation policies in island governance: ensuring both protection and external territorial control. More broadly, the study demonstrates how conservation planning operates as a governance instrument that shapes and reveals land values and power distribution. These findings suggest that boundary delineation should be explicitly treated as a political and governance instrument, requiring greater transparency, stronger accountability, and more substantive inclusion of local actors to avoid reinforcing existing power asymmetries in spatial planning.