Ex Ante Social Legitimacy and Institutional Stakeholder Approval of Protected Area Designation: Evidence from the Proposed Iblei National Park

The designation of protected areas depends not only on ecological criteria but also on social acceptability. This study investigates the factors associated with ex ante support for the proposed Iblei National Park (Italy) through a survey of institutional stakeholders—public bodies, category associations, professional orders, and environmental associations—who are directly involved in or affected by the designation process. Focusing on environmental worldviews, place identity, and perceived economic benefits, the analysis combines parsimonious composite indices with exploratory ordinal regression models. Descriptive and associative results show that environmental attitudes and place identity are positively associated with stated support in baseline specifications, although neither association reaches conventional levels of statistical significance. When perceived economic benefits are added, they show the largest association with stated support among the variables considered, while the estimated associations of environmental values and place identity are attenuated to magnitudes indistinguishable from zero. The association of perceived economic benefits is stable in sign and magnitude across specifications, though its statistical strength varies with how the outcome is operationalised. These patterns, drawn from a small, near-complete population of institutional stakeholders, suggest that value- and identity-based orientations shape a general predisposition toward conservation, while explicit stakeholder endorsement is more closely associated with expectations of local economic benefits. We interpret these findings as exploratory evidence on distinct, and possibly complementary, channels of ex ante social legitimacy, to be corroborated by larger and mixed-method research designs.