Naslov
No Island is an Island: Participatory Development Planning on the Croatian Islands

Autori
Starc, Nenad ; Stubbs, Paul

Izvornik
International journal of sustainable development and planning (1743-7601) 9 (2014), 2; 158-176

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
Islands ; Croatia ; Participation ; Planning

Sažetak
Despite a straightforward commonsense requirement that governmental policy makers have to share their regional development management role with everybody that is involved in and /or affected by these policies, stakeholders’ participation is too often neglected or even deliberately disregarded in existing regional policies. The paper seeks to address this paradox (policy defect?) through a study of the Croatian islands. A summary of existing island studies and concepts such as “island vulnerability”, “islandness” and “nissology” is provided at the beginning. The Croatian islands appear to fit in such concepts as they went through almost everything that can happen to an archipelago: undesired disembarkations, overseas emigration and depopulation, ill conceived policies, the conjunction of war and transition, unsustainable development, exacerbation of vulnerability when systems of governance are imposed from outside etc. The socio-economic history of the Croatian islands is viewed in a paper as a nonlinear narrative of various uninvited but irresistible disembarkations, from the ancient Romans to socialist planners and transition policy makers. In spite of the socialist selfmanagement system that the Croatian island communities had been a part of for almost half a century stakeholders’ participation was proposed only recently. It was institutionalized in 1997 when the National Island Development Programme was passed by the Croatian Parliament and the Island Development Centre established at the ministry in charge of post war development. The Island Law and some necessary by laws were passed in the period 1999 – 2002 providing preparation of Sustainable Island Development Programmes for each and every inhabited island and securing a special island item in the national budget. This constituted a rather peculiar top down – bottom up way of island development management. The implementation of the island development management scheme provided in such a way is discussed in the remainder. Participation in island development management is addressed as a specific topic within the study of local development planning in a post-communist transition context. The importance of multi-level, pluralistic planning, replacing ‘top-down’ centralised planning has been emphasized and opposed to the uncritical transfer of conceptual schemes and specific hypotheses from the so called ‘mainland’ or from developed capitalist democracies. It is shown how the Croatian practice of central financing has acted as a disincentive for island administrations to increase their own development management capacity. Despite certain gains the complex relationships between political competencies, institutional capacities, and socio- cultural forces continue to work against participatory planning, with broader macro-level political economies seemingly highly mediated in the context of Croatian island development. The pessimistic conclusion appears to be that only the top down element of strategic planning in terms of development of the Croatian islands has been implemented, and this itself in a distorted, and highly inconsistent way. A more optimistic conclusion might, perhaps, suggest that twin processes of pressure from the process of European integration could combine with an increasing competence, awareness and pressure from civil society organisations to promote good participatory governance.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Ekonomija, Sociologija

POVEZANOST RADA