Abstracts

For several decades in Croatia, two population trends have been overlapping: the decline in the number of permanent and the rise in the number of temporary inhabitants. Only in the last two inter-census period, Croatia lost about 10% of population while the number of second homes increased for about 40%. Both these trends are more pronounced in rural and peripheral settlements, where the change in the ratio between part-time and full-time residents impacts process of local development on different levels. In order to better understand social aspect of this process, especially the nature of (dis)agreement between locals and second home users about the direction of local development, we conducted three case studies in three rural and peri-urban settlements with large number of second homes. In this presentation we will focus on community participation in local development of second home areas. More precisely, one of the main aims of the research project was to measure engagement level of part-time and full-time residents in planning local development. Additionally, we were interested in mechanism of this engagement, particularly associations between various kinds of community participation in development and local social relations. Data for this analysis was collected by a face to face questionnaire interview from 1015 respondents (447 locals and 568 second home users). To determine the extent to which community participation in development and local social relations are linked correlation and linear regression analyses were employed. Our analysis revealed that members of both groups were not much engaged in community participation in development. Although, second home users showed a little more of interest. Also, we found that local social relations are important predictors of community participation in development but only for community of second home users.