Open access article: please credit the authors and the full source.With the increasing emergence of renewable energy sites in Switzerland, new impacts on the landscape can be observed. Above the Alpine village of Bellwald, a pilot project testing avalanche barriers as a possible site for photovoltaic installations was inaugurated in 2012. This study focused on social aspects of the project and asked questions about local residents' and tourists' perceptions of and attitudes toward the installations. Its findings reveal that the new elements are not perceived as a drastic intrusion into the landscape, because the view was already affected by the avalanche barriers, which are accepted because of their vital protective function. No significant difference was found between residents' and tourists' evaluation of the new photovoltaic installations. However, different factors influenced the perceptions of these 2 groups. In both groups, conceptions related to place played an important role in the evaluation of possible photovoltaic sites.

This article engages with conceptions of equity and justice in protected area negotiations and ties in with recent scientific discourses on the importance of social equity for successful biodiversity conservation. I follow the question of how conceptions of justice shaped discussions surrounding a national park project in Switzerland, Parc Adula. The project was rejected in a public vote in 2016. Drawing on qualitative interview data, this article analyses park negotiations and sheds light on a plurality of senses of justice. Whereas Parc Adula as a bottom-up project based on direct democracy already respected just procedures, perceptions of (in-)justice still informed day-today discussions and disputes. Thus, I argue that understanding justice as a process that reveals itself in disputes, and acknowledging its plurality, can help understand struggles over conservation and regional development.

This article engages with pragmatic sociology to understand an environmental dispute and its underlying moral issues in a direct-democratic and bottom-up setting. The non-establishment of a planned national park in the Swiss Alps serves as a case study to analyse principles of worth presented in national park negotiations. We point to the complex nature of conservation negotiations and argue that loosely defined ideas of the common good can lead to additional difficulties for a bottom-up project. Moreover, we open up new ground for discussion concerning the interplay of nature conservation and direct democracy.

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