Visitor Management Tools for Protected Areas Focused on Sustainable Tourism Development: The Croatian Experience

Abstract

The protected natural areas are becoming increasingly popular vacation destinations with both international and domestic travellers. Protected area may be an area of land and/or sea dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other means. It might have many different purposes. This means that biodiversity protection, though a critically important function is far from being the only purpose and is often not the primary purpose of many protected areas. As an ever-growing activity, tourism in protected areas produces benefits and cost that often interact in complex ways. Therefore, it is obvious that special attention has to be paid to the protected areas governance model and its effectiveness, especially in terms of the planning and control process enhancement for the purpose of avoiding possible conflicts over nature protection and tourism development. This paper focuses on the analysis of problems that protected areas are facing in relation to tourism development, in particular from the Croatian protected areas' point of view (specifically, national parks and nature parks). Additionally it offers some recommendations concerning possible environmental management strategies, specifically those related to visitor management, whose tools ought to be implemented in order to keep both the protected areas' system and tourism development sustainable. These recommendations are to be discussed from the prospective of the new governance system implementation that might help in achieving the sustainability goals of Croatian protected areas.

Geological Heritage, Geotourism and Local Development in Aggtelek National Park (NE Hungary)

“…As for karstic national parks visitations, the increase of tourism can be observed in certain cases (Mari and Telbisz 2018), for instance in the Croatian national parks (Petrić and Mandić 2014). In some cases, the rise in visitor numbers is even too fast, putting an extra burden on nature, such as in Krka National Park (NPKRKA 2018) or in Plitvice Lakes National Park (UNESCO World Heritage Committee 2017).…”

Stakeholder Management and the Imbalance of Power: A Central Mediterranean Perspective on Tourism in Marine Protected Areas

“…Marine ecotourism-a category of ecotourism which is practised in marine and coastal settings (Cater 2003)-is one of the fastest-growing segments (Sakellariadou 2014) and is supported by the blue growth strategy (Neva 2020). Islands have been widely regarded as ideal venues for marine ecotourism (Cater and Cater 2007;Fotiou et al 2002;Halpenny 2001;Sakellariadou 2014), and this is often due to the presence of MPAs which act as conservation tools for marine biodiversity (Pham 2020) and ideal sites for marine ecotourism (Agardy 1993;Gerovassileiou et al 2009;Petrić and Mandić 2014;Agius et al 2019). In the case of the Mediterranean, these are mostly located around or adjacent to islands (Francour et al 2001) increasing such potential.…”

The effects of the development of rural tourism on Stara Planina

“…Since the focus of this paper is economic effects, we will keep our focus on economic management tools for tourists on Stara Planina because, according to Petrić (2014), it is desirable to introduce management tools for tourists, which may be divided into four groups: institutional, economic tools, management tools and information technology. The basic economic tools can be: the difference in prices compared to other destinations, the collection of environmental tourist taxes taking into account that Stara Planina has been declared a national park, but they could also include the encouragement of both the public and private sectors that aims to increase the volume of visitors and the rational use of energy and other resources (Petrić, 2014).…”