Conservation Policies as Local Development Policies : The Case of the Italian National Parks

Without full awareness of the practical implications and methodological difficulties, conservation policies have been given significant priority in Italy in the past decade. Considering the extraordinary cultural and ecological values of Italian landscape, this role assigned to conservation policies is not unwarranted. Yet if conservation policies are to be effective, they must be given a conceptual basis appropriate to the nature of the disequilibria which they are intended to cope. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for conservation policies in protected territories where both cultural and natural capital are subject to conservation - as is the case of most national (and regional) natural parks in Italy. It argues that in protected territories where human landscape are important part of local capital, conservation policies ought to be conceptualized as development policies. Constraining property rights on local resources - which is the conventional conception of conservation policies - should be set in the context of a more broadly encompassing approach in which the policy domain of conservation policies is the development trajectories of the local systems concerned