Oana Adelina Stefan

This project examines the conundrum between socialist Romania’s promotion as a clean, healthy environment so as to lure tourists and its industrial modernization strategy in the Carpathians, which involved major changes in the natural landscape. It argues that tourism experts in Romania skillfully navigated between promoting the country as having a clean environment and unspoiled landscapes and its overall developmental strategy, which involved intensive urbanization, as a way to achieve modernization. This tension was especially notable among the Romanian political elites who believed that economic underdevelopment justified a certain ambivalence in relation to the environment.