Protected areas are key instruments for conserving biodiversity and landscapes. Yet, conservation initiatives are still often struggling to accommodate people’s needs, provoking conflicts, and lacking support from local communities. Our study combines environmental justice and ecosystem services approaches to provide a critical understanding of trade-offs between people’s interests and conservation goals in the case study of Circeo National Park (Italy). Applying a qualitative content analysis of different materials and using a survey of local residents, we focus on three main objectives: analysing the implementation of the ecosystem services framework in policy documents and exploring how different people value benefits from nature; investigating the decision-making process in terms of participation, information and communication strategies; and identifying how conservation policies generated different allocations of benefits, burdens and inequalities among social groups. The integrated approach applied in our study highlights ways to systematically uncover perceived injustices and identifies potential conflict lines. In the long run, this approach might help to increase the public acceptance of protected areas by fostering sustainability also in its often-overlooked social dimension.

The digitization of tourism has made numerous platforms available, but there remains a significant shortage of tools capable of promoting local events and activities. This study hypothesizes that a decentralized digital interface can mitigate over-tourism. We conducted an experiment by deploying a digital platform to assess the synergy between local providers and visitors through the Tourism Open-ended Experimentation Platform (TOEP), a multi-interface solution designed to directly connect tourism activity providers with residents and visitors. The platform integrates a web portal for providers and a mobile app for users, supported by a recommendation system based on individual profiles and preferences. TOEP stands out for its focus on local and sustainable tourism, facilitating the promotion of smaller events and helping to reduce the concentration of tourist flows in already saturated destinations. Initial validation, conducted with a panel of industry experts, highlighted the ease of use and good organization of the interfaces, with scores above average. Preliminary results confirm the relevance of TOEP as a tool for the sustainable and digitized promotion of local tourism, opening prospects for development towards a smart, participatory tourism ecosystem that can be replicated in different territorial contexts.

Proposals for Intertwining Nature and Culture in Protected Areas: the Musica in Quota Festival In a context where nature and culture always appear separate, this contribution aims to overcome this dichotomy, proposing a musical festival as an example. Musica in Quota takes place among mountains and protected areas of the Verbano Cusio Ossola province, in the northwest of Piedmont. In the various events of the traveling exhibition, nature becomes the theatre of musical performances. The particular attention to the environmental, social, and economic needs of the local context makes it a virtuous case of programming able to promote the reappropriation of protected spaces through sustainable and participatory cultural practices that translate into active conservation.