Competence of environmental institution
The expansion or narrowing of the powers and duties of environmental institutions and authorities faithfully reflects what the administration of a given country thinks of sustainability or how it ranks its importance.
The duties and competences of national parks have been continuously reduced in the past years. They lost much of their official powers which were deployed with the environment and nature protection inspectorates. Their headcount and on-location presence have been reduced. As a culmination of the process, the Minister for Rural Development commissioned the newly appointed Secretary of State in charge of the national land programme to supervise the exploitation of "land areas managed under in the trusteeship of national parks" in 2013. While the majority of the Hungarian conservation profession believes that the ownership and management of the most important protected areas should by default belong with the national parks, the exact opposite of that can be observed in reality. From a professional perspective , this trend is entirely unjustified.