ABSTRACT
Starting with Europe’s first national parks in the Lapland Mountains in 1909, the area protected in Sweden has increased to over 10 per cent of the land with a heavily skewed distribution towards the mountain region in the north. The history of protected areas in Sweden involves many recurrent themes, but also a great deal of change and many international influences. For example, today we have the historically rooted theme of national park establishment locally perceived as the central authorities preventing local recreation traditions and development, simultaneously with the theme of protected areas as a motivation for international visitors and therefore an element in local tourism opportunities. The manifold nature of this frame of reference for the role of, and debate concerning, protected areas in Sweden is today reinforced by at least two very important global tendencies: (1) the increased number of different types of protected areas (e.g. the EU’s Natura 2000, UNESCO’s World Heritage and Man and Biosphere reserves) used parallel to more traditional instruments like national parks and nature reserves; and (2) the attempt to outdistance the ‘fortress conservation’ tradition and replace this with more of a bottom-up perspective involving local participation and regional development (Jones 1999, Attwell and Cotterill 2000, Brockington 2002, Gössling and Hultman 2006). In this diverse frame of reference of traditions, changes and ambitions, tourism is a key issue and since protected areas are located mainly in rural regions, tourism to such areas can play an important role in their socioeconomic development (Machlis and Field 2000).
