From Conflict to Partnership? Interactions between Protected Areas, Local Communities and Operators of Tourism Enterprises in Two German National Park Regions

Conflicts of interest between conservation objectives and the continuation of conventional land uses have accompanied national parks in Germany since the first park’s designation in 1970. This is not surprising as most of Central Europe is densely populated and landscapes have been used intensively for agriculture, forestry, resource extraction, and recreational purposes over several centuries. Hence, unaltered landscapes and unimpaired wilderness hardly exist. These combined features distinguish German national parks from their counterparts in the Americas, Africa or Asia. Against this background, parks-people relationships have occupied researchers in Germany for more than twenty years. Whereas international research has focused mostly on testing various social theories to explain resistance among locals, research in Germany has for many years focused on a more practitioner-oriented approach in order to solve most pressing conflicts that arose after national park designations. This paper combines two independent case studies from Harz and Bayerischer Wald National Parks in order to illustrate the setting of parks-people research in Germany and to identify links to approaches used in othe