Park-Local People-Tourist Relationships in Karst National Parks, the presentation of an International Project

Karst areas are generally disadvantaged for traditional farming due to limited water availability, poor soils and topographic difficulties. Therefore, their population density has always been lower throughout history than in other landscapes. However, because of this fact, their natural vegetation has often remained in better condition than in other areas, and due to their special surface and subsurface morphology, karst areas are popular tourist destinations in many places. As a result, many karst areas have been declared national parks (NPs) in Europe and other continents as well. A national park can have a number of benefits for the protected area: it primarily protects nature, but it also provides employment opportunities and can bring extra financial resources to those who live there. However, there are also certain restrictions that may result in conflicts. In recent decades, there has been an increasing demand that national parks should also serve the well-being of local people in addition to their primary nature conservation goals. The development of tourism is typical in most national parks, but this development may also conflict with nature conservation goals and, in some cases, with local people. Thus, in the park–local people–tourists triangle, all relationships must be properly balanced. To analyse these relationships, we established an international research project that has run from 2017 to 2022 and is supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary. In the framework of this project, we carried out a regional comparison and examined karst national parks (and in one case a nature park) from 6 countries using the same methodology. The methods included demographic analysis in a GIS framework, questionnaire surveys with local people, visitors and NP employees, and interviews with key actors (NP managers, mayors, research experts). The examined sites were Aggtelek NP (Hungary), Slovak Karst NP (Slovakia), Tara NP (Serbia)