Hi,
You can actually do this both ways.
Firstly, indeed you can create participation restriction whatever way you want (e.g. residents of Suriname only). The only restriction is your national legal constraints. In some countries they allow only local residents to win prizes because of legal requirements, in other countries it might be illegal to deny participation to foreigners.
Secondly, you may well create special nominations for locals and/or foreigners if you want and you consider it justified. We experimented this in Ukraine a few times.
For example, once we had a special prize for a photo made by a foreigner (with the winner even coming to Kyiv to the award ceremony - obviously it was before the Russian invasion) because we had a partner interested in it and we wanted to reach the audience of tourists and/or expats.
On another occasion we had a special prize for a photo made by a (Ukrainian) secondary school student - because we had a partner working with this audience and we saw this as a great opportunity to encourage participation there.
In both cases people could contend for main prizes and for the specific prize. In all cases it was primarily based on self-identification (we required users to tick a box or sign on a page if they wanted to participate in this special nomination.
I would honestly recommend the later approach - try to identify potential audience (e.g. local students, members of a local photographic society etc.) and introduce a special award for them. This does encourage participation without discouraging others.
Mykola (NickK)
WLM Ukraine