The legal framework for protected areas management in Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia

The paper analyzes the laws related to the management of protected areas, i.e., determining the meaning of the content and characteristics of the texts of the laws regarding management, in order to identify possible identities, absences or contradictions in meaning. The aim of this research is to find out the nature of the legislation related to the management of protected areas, on the basis of the characteristics of the paragraphs in the observed laws of the selected countries. The analysis was carried out for three countries: Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia. Bearing in mind that these issues are subject of several different laws, the following acts were taken into account: the Law on Forests, the Law on Environmental Protection, the Law on Nature Conservation and the Law on National Parks. In all the observed countries, general entries are predominated (63.9%), while the entries with organizational (24.9%) and economic (11.2%) characters are much less common. When it comes to individual entries, “Protection” is the most frequent, followed by “Ecology” and “Status / Function”, all of which belong to the group of general entries. In the group of entries with organizational character, “Users” is dominant, and in the group of entries with economic character, the most important is “Forestry”. When regulating protected area management issues, law drafters should be more focused on defining concrete solutions, which will improve work in practice, and thus satisfy the basic purpose of their adoption (protection of selected areas of social significance). [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 43007: Studies of climate changes and their impact on the environment - monitoring impacts, adaptation and mitigation, sub-project “Socio-economic development, mitigation and adaptation to climate change no. 43007/16-III]