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The official designation of protected areas in the Valencian Community (Spain) was initiated in the mid-1980s by the first government of the region through the creation of various classes of protection. The process was executed in an expeditious manner following the devolution of environmental management by the Spanish state in 1984. It was carried out in the absence of an adequate legal framework on the regional level; in the context of social mobilization in defence of the moves, as well as varying degrees of local opposition; and parallel to an extensive and expanding urbanization of the coastline. Into this context of legitimization of democratic political powers and shifting approaches to eco-system conservation was then added the concept of urgent protection, but without the sufficient resources and management tools to accomplish it. This paper presents the keys to understanding the initial processes of institutionalization of protected areas in the Valencian Community (Spain) through interviews with the holders of the principle political and managerial positions at the time.

Depopulation is a consolidated research topic and more recently it is also important for governments. In this context, we propose an alternative methodology of emerging patterns to reveal significant trends and nuances of the population decreasing in Spanish municipalities between 1998 and 2021. To this goal, we use conventional sources, such as the Municipal Register of Inhabitants. Our results demonstrate a cold-hot bipolar systemic behavior, more balanced in its surface dimension than in the demographic one. It confirms two realities north-south in the depopulating Spain. Cold spots are concentrated in the northern half of the country with intensifying and consecutive patterns. Finally, the study provides a scalable methodology that is replicable in other periods and/or territories.

Airports have become one of the main factors of urban competitiveness, due to their role as communication nodes and also due to their ability to generate economic activity. The literature shows that, in many metropolitan areas, airports are an important pole of economic activity that attracts companies related to airport activity, but also other types of firms due to their accessibility and the lower price of land compared to the city center. This article describes the plan for the creation of an Airport City at Barcelona Airport and estimates the economic effect that its implementation would have on the Catalan and Spanish economy.

Public conservation policies in Catalonia began in the 1970s as a response to a demand from civil society, with a growing concern about the negative impacts of Franco’s developmentalism, and were configured as an instrument of land-use planning. Based on qualitative interviews with informants of different profiles who played a special role in this period, this article studies the institutionalisation of nature conservation in Catalonia between 1970 and 1988, analyses the role of the administrations involved, and shows the relevance of the changing political-social context of the period in this process.

The text examines legal frameworks in Portugal to discuss how nature conservation has been managed from a state perspective. Natural Protected Areas correspond to a desire of the political sphere to match an international environmental agenda. However, they have been implemented mainly in private properties or in baldios (communal, though not public lands). Therefore, in practical terms, a tension has been always present between the state and the communities and/or private owners since the beginning of the 20th Century with the creation of ‘forest perimeters’. The article flies over the critical turning points in Portuguese conservation policies from the seventies of the 20th Century to present-day with the recently created diploma of co-management for Protected Areas.

The aim of this paper is to identify and quantify econometrically the determinants of the spending needs of the Autonomous Communities. The combination of individual fixed effects that capture unobservable inter-territorial differences in spending preferences or efficiency, on the one hand, with expenditure determinants of low variability, on the other poses problems for traditional estimators. To overcome this limitation, alternative econometric specifications and estimators are explored. The results show that the estimated coefficients and their significance change substantially, not being able to guarantee the necessary robustness to sustain an adequate political discussion. Therefore, it is necessary to bet on other strategies for empirical work that allow us to the spending preferences of the Autonomous Communities.

We analyze the effect of the reception of remittances on violence (approximated by the homicide mortality rate). The relevance of the study lies in the research of two phenomena with high impact on Mexico’s society and economy. We used a linear regression model with instrumental variables. At the municipal level we found a high and positive correlation between the homicide rate and the percentage of households that receive remittances, although this relationship does not extend throughout the whole territory. In general, the reception of remittances had a significant effect in the increase of violence.

Between 1978 and 1989, a nationally and internationally acclaimed nature conservation model was created in Andalusia. It would be the result of a complex political process, marked by contradictory tendencies (the transition from Francoism to parliamentarism, from centralism to autonomy), social-environmental activism, and disputes among professional disciplines (biology, engineering, geography, among others). Using qualitative interviews, hemerographic and documentary sources, we explain this model, its vision and instruments, as a political-administrative apparatus that result from personal relationships and the confrontation between political currents within the ruling party in Andalusia (PSOE) in the context of rising environmentalist demands and movement.

This article explores the role of social movements in shaping conservation policy in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in the territories of Catalonia, Andalusia and the Valencian Community. Through qualitative research based on in-depth interviews and documentary analysis, we address from a comparative perspective how citizen mobilization and scientific and academic associations influenced the declaration of the first natural parks through the support or rejection of conservation initiatives.