No island is an island: participatory development planning on the croatian islands

Abstract

This text provides an overview of the history of attempts to introduce participatory development planning on the Croatian islands. Within the study of islands, there has been little attention to islands in countries undergoing post-socialist transition. Similarly, within the study of post-socialist strategic development planning, there has been almost no attention to islands. This study addresses both the resilience of islands and their heightened susceptibility to change, borrowing a periodisation from political economies of contemporary Croatia which emphasise the signifi cance of multiple transitions. The text explores island development within socialist Yugoslavia, with islands subsumed within wider processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and, later, coastal tourism. As Croatia's independence was inextricably linked to war, a crisis-induced authoritarian centralism also mitigated against islanders becoming development subjects. The post-war picture, marked as it is by a slow process of integration into EU norms and practices, shows the gap between the legislative rhetoric and the on the ground practice of participatory development planning. The text concludes that, thus far, only the top down element of strategic planning in terms of island development has been implemented, and this itself in a distorted, contradictory, and highly inconsistent, way.

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds

“…This is illustrated by Bongie's (1998) Rankin (2016), Pugh (2016a) and Pugh and Grove's (2017) focus upon 'archipelagic assemblages'; Sheller's (2000Sheller's ( , 2007 work on archipelagic 'mobilities'; Dening (2007), King (2007) and Connell's (2018) work on migration and islanders; Crane and Fletcher's (2017) focus upon archipelagic thinking in island literatures; Loughran's (2019) on archipelagic education; and Roberts and Stephens (2017) foregrounding of the archipelagic nature of the Americas. There are many, many others besides who foreground islands as relational spaces (Stratford, 2003;Steinberg, 2005;Hay, 2006Hay, , 2013Papoutsaki and Harris, 2008;Clark and Tsai, 2009;Baldacchino and Royle, 2010;Alexander, 2016;Starc and Stubbs, 2014;Ronström, 2015;Benítez-Rojo, 2016;Kearns and Collins, 2016;Bremner, 2016;Hong, 2017;Graziadei et al, 2017;Murray, 2018;Vale, 2018;Evans and Harris, 2018;Carter, 2018;Nimführ and Sesay, 2019;Davis, 2020;Isaacs, 2020). For an excellent overview of a variety of recent approaches see Michelle Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel's (2020) collection Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking.…”

Novi Metodološki Pristup Lociranju Usp-a U Promotivnim Videima Otoka: Slučaj Hrvatskih Otoka

“…Croatia's coastline is an extremely indented geographical area. It is, in fact, an archipelago containing 1,246 islands, islets, reefs and cliffs; however, only 79 of them can be considered as "regular" and inhabitable islands (Starc and Stubbs, 2014;Faričić, Graovac and Čuka, 2010;Razović and Tomljenović, 2015). The Croatian islands occupy 69% of the Croatian coastline (lengthwise and into the territorial waters) and about 5% of the country's total area.…”

“…Only on four islands does the Croatian central government directly exercise control through the use of four local supervision units that control these specific islands. In other places, there are supervision units that control clusters of islands, and in some places there are no municipal authorities at all, causing limitations in development activities (Starc and Stubbs, 2014). In light of this situation, there is a need to create a marketing product that presents a clear and coherent marketing message focused on the relevant target audience.…”

“…In addition, all development issues on the islands including tourism ones have the challenge of requiring its local authorities to deal with all money-raising issues. This policy can be due to either bureaucratic failures or neoliberal policies that place all money-raising issues in the hands of local authorities, a situation that creates a complex relationship in which local taxing decisions seem to act against local stakeholder interests ( Starc and Stubbs, 2014). In general, it can be said that the Croatian islands tend to suffer from problems that are typical of societies in transition from a traditional agriculture society to an industrial and post-industrial one (Nejašmić and Štambuk, 2003;Pejnović, 2004).…”

An overview of small island management and biodiversity protection in Albania

“…The Mediterranean Basin constitutes the second largest hotspot on a global scale and its European part is one of the world's major centers of biodiversity (Natopanou and Panitsa, 2020;Blonde et al, 2010) due to an ensemble of highly heterogeneous habitats with diverse topographies, soil types, and microclimates related to altitude, slope exposure, and precipitation (Médail and Quézel, 1997). For a long time globally, islands have been branded long before the concept found its way into management practices (Baldacchino, 2012;Calado et al, 2014), while the small ones are now, unwittingly, the objects of what may be the most lavish, global and consistent branding exercise in human history (Baum et al, 2000;Baldigara et al, 2012;Starc and Stubbs, 2014;Baldacchino, 2012, Gamberožić, 2021. Further on the island ecosystems have always played a leading role in conservation biology (Nogué et al, 2017).…”