engleski

Croatian rural areas as rural social-ecological systems: challenges and perspectives

Rural areas are specific social-ecological systems when compared to urban areas. This uniqueness should be taken into consideration when examining the resilience, adaptability and vulnerability of rural areas when faced with contemporary social-ecological challenges and when thinking about their perspectives in developing strategies of rural development. In Croatia, rural areas have gone through a number of dramatic changes over the past century. On the one hand, they have experienced three major waves of modernization, which were marked by ideological, economic and social changes, most recently including the transition to democracy after gaining independence as a nation-state and becoming a full member of the European Union. On the other hand, rural areas in Croatia have gone through the same influences as in other countries caused by globalization, modernization, urbanization and industrialization processes. In this presentation, we bring the analysis of contemporary state of Croatian rural areas analysed through the theoretical and empirical lens of rural social-ecological systems (RSES). We will also present the preliminary results from deep semi-structured interviews conducted in 2022 among Croatian rural population (N=50) on their subjective evaluation of their relationship with their natural environment and their perception of positive and negative aspects regarding the state and changes of the natural environment in their places of residence. This research is part of the larger research project “Socio-ecological challenges to rural development: objective and subjective indicators of resilience of Croatian rural social-ecological systems – SECRURAL”, which is a five-year project (2020-2024) funded by the Croatian Science Foundation under the grant number UIP-2019-04-5257.

rural areas ; rural social-ecological systems ; vulnerability ; resilience ; Croatia

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