Conservation policies and local development in national parks: a conceptual framework for the Italian case (16)

Theme Track: Rural and Peripheral Areas - Sustainable Development

Authors:
Calafati, Antonio ; Mazzoni, Francesca

One of the most important methodological problems that conservation policies have to deal with in natural parks is the interpretation of the relation between the production process and the capital. This is because a significant part of the natural and artificial capital one finds in national parks, and that is to be conserved is - or at least was - functional to the production process. In Italy, where many natural parks and above all the majority of national parks are territories in which man-made landscapes are of notable importance and where about 10% of the national territory has been designated as protected areas, this is a key policy issue nowadays. Indeed, reflections on the capital conservation in natural parks have developed, especially in recent decades, around the theme of the conservation of human landscapes. The British experience, for instance, has much to teach with regard to the importance of reconciling conservation and local development. The first methodological problem posed by the study of the interdependence between the economic process and the state of capital consists in the identification of the social system that generates the economic process that is the subject of our analysis. By following a perspective that has emerged recently in development economics, in the paper it is argued that the concept of local system should be introduced in the analysis of national parks to reach an effective solution to the problem of identifying local pattern of economic evolution and their implication for the state of the natural and artificial capital.

By introducing the notion of local system as the starting point of the analysis, one comes to interpret the conservation policies as regulation policies. The state of capital conservation, being the outcome (with a temporal lag) of a sequence of external effects generated by the economic process, must be seen as the final policy aim. The policy-induced modifications of the economic process may be regarded as an intermediate objective, meanwhile changes in the organisation of the local system which can be generated by public decision makers are the primary target of policies. Indeed, when the aims of conservation are directed towards a human landscape, conservation policies inevitably intersect and overlap other classes of public policies. That raises difficult methodological issues in addition to practical problems. In effect, a conceptual system that permits an efficient integration of territorial policies is still very far away. Just to make an example - which will be dealt with extensively in the paper - in spite of the new orientations today`s agricultural policy contrasts deeply with the logic of capital conservation, to the extent that it often becomes an obstacle to the conservation policies in national parks.

This work presents a conceptual system that allows one to highlight the extent and importance of the intersection among different policy instruments in natural parks. Although the focal point of these reflections is directed towards natural parks, the analysis can also be useful for a critical reflection on the conceptual foundations of conservation policies.

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