“The park effect”? An assessment test of the territorial impacts of Italian National Parks, thirty years after the framework legislation

•Thirty years after the institution of the most important protected areas of the country, the political world and the Italian environmental movement are still discussing the main role that national parks should play: sources of economic development of the territory or means of conservation of biodiversity and landscape.•But Italian national parks almost all insist on mountain areas, which have been involved in serious economic and social crisis for decades, and research shows that the national park brand has not managed to relieve these areas from this crisis, despite their extremely high quality environmental.•Consequently, territorial policy must commit resources to preserve their biodiversity and their fundamental role as reservoirs of ecosystem services. After thirty years of the framework legislation for parks, their effect on the territories and social communities that created new national park institutes in 1991 was investigated. Some significant indicators were used, such as demography, the structure of records and income conditions, and it emerged that the National Parks did not lead to a clear separation from the dynamics that were already in effect after World War II, and which are typical of the disadvantaged areas in which they are established, in all of that time. There are undoubtedly many causes for this, and they also differ from park to park. In a country like Italy, these certainly depend on the geographic location, since significant socio-economic differences are found along its latitudinal line.