TABLE OF CONTENTSPage

Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out (Jeffrey Sayer) 1

Locating and designing an ecologically representative network of forest protected areasTowards a Framework for Implementing a Representative System of Forest Protected Areas (Bob Pressey)

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The National Protected Area System Plan in Madagascar (Martin Nicoll, Rasolofo Louis Andriamahaly, Brigitte Carr-Dirick)

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Economic Design Principles for Forest Protected Areas (Amar Inamdar) 43

Ecological aspects of design

WWF-Canada's Endangered Spaces Campaign (Arlin Hackman) 57

Protected Area System Planning in Lao PDR (Klaus Berkmuller) 73

Integrating forest protected areas within national development strategiesIntegrating Forest Protected Areas within National Development Strategies (Thomas McShane and Gonzalo Oviedo)

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Is it Always Right to Kill the Goose? Or IUCN Categories V and VI versus community based resource management (Antoine Leclerc and Baptiste Noël Randrianandianina)

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The Tropical Forestry Action Programme - lessons from Ethiopia and Zambia (Ermias Bekele) 101

Balancing Wildlife Conservation with Local Use when Designing Protected Area Systems in Tropical Forests (Elizabeth Bennett)

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People and Totally Protected Areas in Sarawak (Oswald Braken Tisen and Elizabeth Bennett) 129

Economic sustainability of forest protected areas

ANGAP’s Approach to a Sustainable Future (Antoine Leclerc and Tiana Razafimahatratra) 139

Real World Conservation: Combining Biological, Economic and Social Criteria in Planning a National System of Forest Nature Reserves for Uganda (Peter Howard)

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Nature Tourism and Protected Area Pricing: Lessons learned from Africa (Wolf Krug) 159

Parastatal Governance of State Protected Areas in Africa and the Caribbean (Alexander James, Sam Kanyamibwa and Michael Green)

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Assessing management effectiveness of forest protected areasCaring for the Assets – the Effectiveness of Protected Areas Management (Adrian Phillips) 189

The WCPA Management Effectiveness Framework – Where to from here? (Marc Hockings, Nigel Dudley and Sue Stolton)

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Meeting global information and reporting needs Managing and Applying Information on Protected Area Management Effectiveness at Global and Regional Levels: The Role of WCMC and WCPA (Jeremy Harrison and Marc Hockings)

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Maintaining the Integrity of Natural World Heritage Sites (Bing Lucas) 227

Site Conservation Planning - A Framework for Developing and Measuring the Impact of Effective Biodiversity Conservation Strategies (Jeffrey Parrish)

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The Use of Certification of Sustainable Management Systems and their Possible Application to Protected Area Management (Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley)

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Institutional and utilization issues for assessment systems

Institutionalizing Assessments within Protected Area Management Regimes (Robbie Robinson) 269

Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Areas (Jamie Ervin) 277

Management Effectiveness and Institutional Credibility – Assessment of Management Effectiveness of Protected Areas in Finland (Stig Johansson)

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NGOs and PA Management Agencies Working Together to Assess Protected Area Effectiveness; Successes, Problems and Prospects - the Experience of WWF-Brazil (Rosa Lemos de Sá, Nurit Bensusan, Leandro Ferreira)

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Evaluate, Change and Propagate – Three Steps to Better Parks (Fiona Leverington and Terry Harper)

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Park Effectiveness in The Tropics (Aaron Bruner, Richard Rice, Ted Gullison and Gustavo Fonseca)

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Assessing management effectiveness of protected areas at the site levelImplementation of a Framework to Monitor the Management of Protected Areas in Central America (José Courrau)

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Management Effectiveness of the Dja Reserve, Cameroon (Elie Hakizumwami) 341

Outcomes-based Evaluation of Management for Protected Areas – a Methodology for Incorporating Evaluation into Management Plans (Glenys Jones)

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PAN Parks – Well-managed Protected Areas Ideal for Sustainable Tourism (Harri Karjalainen) 359

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Foreword

Human impact is so considerable, and there are so many links between the biosphere and the

atmosphere – in both directions – that it is clear that the only course is to manage them jointly. The role

of forests is large in that equation, not just in terms of the global carbon cycle, but also in terms of

biological diversity. They also play critical roles in ecosystem services such as watershed management,

erosion and flood control as well as disaster prevention. So the Forest Protected Areas Initiative

represents a global conservation priority of the highest order.

A key element in the initiative is the goal of protection of at least 10% of the world’s forest

types. Ambitious as this may sound, it is also insufficient. Species-area curves tell us that in the end

10% would conserve only 50% of the species in the forests. In addition, if there is no other forest other

than that in protected areas, it would be impossible to ward off the demands for the many products and

services forests provide.

So the art of the exercise will rest on managing entire forested landscapes in ways which

engage the local communities and provide basic human needs while at the same time providing a haven

for forest biological diversity. It also means improving management of existing parks where the

presence of government is thin to nonexistent. At the same time it is important not to concentrate on

improved management at the expense of creating important new protected areas. Opportunities to do

the latter are rare, fleeting and may never come again. So it is important to think boldly, although not to

the point of foolishness.

Based squarely on past experience of what works and what does not, this initiative comes just

in the nick of time. In contrast, the benefits will last for countless generations.

Thomas E. Lovejoy

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Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out

Jeffrey Sayer

AbstractExtensive areas of forest in the tropics have been legally classified as protected areas;however, in many cases it has been difficult to achieve their conservation. This paperargues that the priority for forest conservation should not be to maximize the areatotally protected but rather to focus on improved management effectiveness. The keysto improved management will be greater clarity in defining objectives and a greatercommitment to finding locally appropriate conservation approaches. This in turn willsuggest that a portfolio of different approaches to forest protection will have a higherchance of success than maximizing the area allocated to arbitrary internationalframeworks. Practical realities will dictate that the portfolio will include a range ofoptions from elite sites given exemplary protection through to well-managed multiple-use areas where protection and use are balanced. I will argue that in tropical countrieswith large populations of poor people multiple-use areas will have an especiallyvaluable role to play. An “ecosystem approach” to the management of these areas isproposed and practical ways to develop this approach are suggested. An ecosystemapproach will require that conservation agencies move away from “command andcontrol” management and adopt output-based systems based on effectivecollaboration between all stakeholders.

Jeffrey SayerDirector GeneralCenter for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)BogorINDONESIATel: +62 251 622 622Fax: +62 251 622 100email: jsayer@cgiar.org

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Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out

Jeffrey Sayer

INTRODUCTION

This paper will focus on the problems of conserving natural areas in the lessdeveloped countries of the tropics. It will deal particularly with the problems ofconserving forests. This is partly because forests are by far the dominant terrestrialecosystems in these countries, but also because these are the systems whoseconservation has attracted most international attention.

The conservation community repeatedly claims that more money is needed for forestconservation. The contention of this paper is that it is equally important to makebetter use of those resources that are already available. After several decades ofinternational action to conserve wild nature in tropical developing countries we arestill losing ground. The Global Environment Facility and several major developmentassistance agencies have channelled billions of dollars towards conservation, yet eventhe sites that have been the targets of this expenditure often remain in danger (forinstance see Wells et al. 1999). I will argue that there are major weaknesses in theconceptual underpinnings of many international conservation programmes. Inparticular the following generic problems:

• Attention has focused on establishing global targets for conservation, for instanceto conserve 10 per cent of all forests, but clarity in defining the objectives ofthese areas is often lacking. Rigorously defined measures of the desired outcomesof conservation programmes are surprisingly rare (Wells et al. 1999).

• Little is invested in learning from the experiences of our attempts to achieveconservation action on the ground. The sort of information that would be ofpractical value to the field manager is difficult to access.

• Attempts to define global conservation programmes are often insensitive to localinterests and costs. We espouse the principles of local involvement andparticipation, but we often make unfounded assumptions about where theinterests of local people really lie.

• Investments have been made in building capacity for sophisticated, “big-picture”conservation professionals. Little has been done to develop capacity for practicalconservation action on the ground. There is a lack of practical conservation fieldpractitioners. Conservation needs its equivalent to the “bare-foot doctors” whohave helped address health problems in the developing world.

• Attention has focused on a few simple models for conservation management – theNorth American National Park model – and not enough in a diversity approachadapted to local political, social, economic and biophysical conditions.

• We make unwarranted assumptions about what will work in practice. Inparticular, we try to transport solutions that have worked in a certain economic orpolitical setting to totally different conditions. We ignore the realities ofprocesses of social learning.

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GLOBALLY SIGNIFICANT SITES AND THE WORLD HERITAGECONVENTION

We still need global monitoring, internationally accepted standards for managingpriority sites, conferences to share our experience, and knowledge and targets towhich all countries can subscribe. Indeed CIFOR et al. (1999) and Sayer et al. (inpress) have argued for greatly increased international attention to be given to the eliteset of forest sites listed under the World Heritage Convention. They argue that thislist should be expanded and that significant international resources be mobilized toensure the integrity of the sites. If this could be achieved then a major proportion ofthe world’s forest biodiversity would be protected. However these authors also arguethat few of these elite conservation sites are pristine forests, undisturbed by humans.In most cases the biodiversity has evolved in the presence of humans for millennia.The objective of conservation should not, therefore, be to exclude people, but toconserve examples of harmonious and sustainable human-forest relations. Zuidema etal. (1997) and Sayer et al. (in press) also argue that caution should be exercised inadding too many sites to protected area systems. There will be diminishing returns ifconservation investments are spread over too many sites, especially if many of thesesites are viewed as being of less than exemplary value. In this paper I will furtherdevelop the hypothesis that the ideal portfolio of conservation areas will consist of asmall number of truly outstanding sites – the cornerstones of the system – the WorldHeritage sites and other national level exemplary areas. But these must be supportedby a much larger network of smaller, more highly targeted nature reserves and muchlarger areas of locally adapted, multiple-use forests.

These second order sites will require different types of management institutions and adifferent culture of “management”. Buffer zone and Integrated Conservation andDevelopment Projects (ICDPs) have broken some of the ground in helping us tounderstand how locally relevant, multiple-use sites might be operated. Onefundamental need for such conservation programmes will be the capacity to makedecisions, adapt objectives to meet local realities, interact meaningfully with localstakeholders, and design and achieve locally adapted solutions. They will require theempowerment of local managers within a framework of national-level regulations toensure equity and the maintenance of non-local benefits.

HOW MANY PROTECTED AREAS DO WE NEED?

Other things being equal it would be best for biodiversity conservation to maximizethe number and extent of pristine, totally protected areas. Unfortunately all otherthings are not equal. The number and extent of protected areas that is feasible anddesirable will differ between a poor country with a large population and littleremaining natural habitat and a richer country with fewer people and large remainingnatural areas. The extent to which protected areas incur costs for local people hasbeen widely under-estimated. In reality many of the benefits of strict protectionaccrue to the global community whilst the costs are met by local people. When theselocal people are already poor the injustice of the situation becomes apparent. Manyacute and intransigent conservation problems occur in areas where large populationsof poor people are putting pressure on declining areas of forests and other naturalsystems. Unfortunately global patterns of population growth and resource use suggestthat these situations are likely to become more widespread in the future. This

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suggests that we have to be far more pragmatic in our attitude to conservation in thesesituations. We cannot conserve everything and we have to make choices. Surely itmakes sense for a major criterion in making these choices to be the maintenance offuture options. And surely the best way of achieving this is to protect the broadestrange of components of the natural systems. Perhaps the vast pristine national parkslocated in remote frontier areas of developing countries should receive less attentionin our conservation programmes. More attention should be given to strategicallylocated, smaller, highly targeted nature reserves spread more broadly throughout thelandscape and including a relatively high density of small sites in the more denselypopulated areas (Zuidema et al. 1997, Corbet and Turner 1996). Many of these siteswill inevitably be highly modified by human activity. This does not diminish theirvalue for conservation but it may indicate that the intensity of conservationmanagement will need to be high. The viability of small, modified nature reserveswill be highly dependent on the nature of surrounding land uses. Conservationprogrammes in these situations will require a good understanding of linkages andinteractions at the landscape level. Conservation programmes for Java, Vietnam,Thailand, large parts of China, coastal West Africa, and the Andean mountains,should probably have more in common with the carefully managed nature reserves ofthe United Kingdom or the multiple use “parcs naturels” of France than with the vastwilderness parks of the western USA.

If one accepts the hypothesis that for much of the tropical developing world it will bedifficult to defend large pristine wilderness areas, then it is axiomatic that muchconservation will have to be achieved in various sorts of multiple-use managednatural systems. Trees on farmlands, riparian woodland strips, forests where timberharvesting is subject to restrictions to favour biodiversity etc, will all be importantinstruments for conservation. Conservation programmes on this model will requirequite different institutions and management capacity to the para-military commandand control cultures of traditional conservation agencies. They will require a greaterdegree of devolution of decision making than has been common in the past. Localconservation programmes will have to be tailored to local needs and negotiated withlocal stakeholders. Conservation professionals will have to have the independence tomake agreements with local people and the judgement to decide upon the trade-offsbetween local needs and national-level conservation objectives. Success must bedefined in terms of quality of management rather than on the basis of the extent of thearea legally protected.

MULTIPLE-USE INTEGRATED PROTECTED AREAS OR STRICTLYPROTECTED SEGREGATED SYSTEMS

Most conservation investments in developing countries focus on strictly protectedareas in IUCN’s categories l, ll and lll (strict nature reserves, national parks etc.). Inindustrialized countries we give far more attention to achieving conservationobjectives as a secondary objective in a broad range of land-use situations. Thus mostof the forest biodiversity of Europe is conserved in forests that are managed for timberand recreation. There is probably no single correct answer to the question of wherethe balance of these approaches should lie. Temperate and boreal forest systems havebeen subject to greater climatic perturbations in recent millennia than forests in thetropics. Their biodiversity may therefore have a greater inherent ability to toleratedisturbance than some tropical forests. But the biological specificity of tropical

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forests may have been exaggerated in the conservation literature. Some recentresearch suggests that the managed landscape mosaics, typical of protected areas insome European countries, would be a good model for the tropics. A more importantdeterminant of the best approach may be the strength of conservation institutions andof civil society in general, rather than the ecology of the forests themselves. Theliterature has been dominated by debates about whether “sustainable forestmanagement” or “strict protection” is the best approach for tropical forests. Incountries with weak legal systems, poorly developed land ownership regimes, largepopulations of poor landless people and a high level of corruption, it will be difficultto make either approach to conservation work in the short term. In these situations,the conservation portfolio should probably be heavily biased towards damagelimitation at the most important locations, accompanied by heavy investments in thedevelopment of a local conservation constituency. The proposed set of SocialCriteria and Indicators (C&I) for Protected Areas in Table 1 (CIFOR, 1999) may bemore valuable measures of progress than the biophysical measures that are morecommonly used.

Table 1. Proposed Social C&I for Protected Areas

P.1. PROTECTED AREA MANAGEMENT MAINTAINS OR ENHANCES FAIR INTERGENERATIONAL ACCESSTO RESOURCES AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS

C.1.1 Local management is effective in controlling maintenance of, and access to, the protected area resources

C.1.2 Forest actors have a reasonable share in the economic benefits derived from protected area use andmanagement

C.1.3 People link their and their children’s future with good management of local resources

P.2. CONCERNED STAKEHOLDERS HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED RIGHTS AND MEANS TO MANAGEPROTECTED AREAS COOPERATIVELY AND EQUITABLY

C.2.1 Effective mechanisms exist for two-way communication related to protected area management amongstakeholders

C.2.2 Local stakeholders have detailed, reciprocal knowledge pertaining to local resource use (including user groupsand gender roles), as well as protected area management plans prior to implementation

C.2.3 Agreement exists on rights and responsibilities of relevant stakeholders

P.3. THE HEALTH OF THE LOCAL PEOPLE, CULTURES AND THE PROTECTED AREA ARE ACCEPTABLE TOALL STAKEHOLDERS

C.3.1 There is a recognizable balance between human activities and environmental conditions

C.3.2 The relationship between forest management and human health is recognized

C.3.3 The relationship between forest maintenance and human culture is acknowledged as important

Adapted and excerpted from CIFOR Generic Template, 1999.

INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGMENTS FOR MULTIPLE-USE LANDSCAPES

Conservation programmes dependent on a complex array of local interactions andnegotiations will clearly require different governance structures and staffing skillsthan those focused on the protection of a small number of large sites. Localmanagement of complex conservation programmes will require a higher intensity of

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interactions with local governments and resource users and less use of centralgovernment fiat to impose regulations. The complex and somewhat bureaucraticstructures for managing the “national parks” of France and England may be evenmore difficult to establish in poorer tropical countries than simpler, centralized “ParksDepartments”. We still have a lot to learn about the implications of devolved anddecentralized governance structures for resource management in poorer countries.Current work by CIFOR to develop tools for adaptive-collaborative management(ACM) of forests should contribute to this. Much can be learned from projects todevelop community management of resources. Joint Forest Management in India,some of the more innovative Integrated Conservation and Development Programs(ICDPs), for instance the Leuser Project in Indonesia and longer standing programmessuch as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania can teach us many lessons.Perhaps some of the most striking conclusions to be drawn from experience in thisarea are:

• Central governments cannot abdicate all authority, if they do then conservationattributes of national or global importance will be lost.

• If large numbers of local stakeholders are going to be empowered to manageresources then the credibility, authority, transparency and professionalism of“intermediate organizations” acquires great importance.

• Long-term success will almost always require financial incentives orcompensation for those local stakeholders who forego resource use in theinterests of resource conservation.

A set of more general principles, developed by Elinor Ostrom from the University ofIndiana for the management of common property resources, may have broadapplication for the management of complex landscape mosaics, even if none of theareas concerned are strictly under “common property” regimes.

• There are clearly defined boundaries: both of the resource and who mayappropriate it.

• Appropriation and provision rules are tailored to local conditions.• The resource users who must abide by appropriation rules have a role in making

them.• Monitors are accountable to, or are, the appropriators.• Sanctions for non-compliance are enforceable, and graduated by severity of

offence.• Low-cost, local mechanisms are available for conflict resolution.• Government recognizes the local right to organize institutions.• Resource producers, managers and beneficiaries are the same people.• Resource management functions are devolved to the lowest level of social

organization at which they can be performed properly.• Marketing and resource sales are open and competitive.• Management represents cooperation between local people, the private sector, and

government, with government retaining ultimate authority over naturalresources.

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There are many parallels between this set of principles and the so-called “Malawiprinciples” on “Ecosystem Approaches to Management” at present under discussionin the context of the work of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The Malawi Principles for Ecosystem Managementfor the Convention on Biological Diversity

• Management objectives are a matter of societal choice.• Management should be decentralized to the lowest appropriate level.• Ecosystem managers should consider the effects (actual or potential) of their

activities on adjacent and other ecosystems.• Recognizing potential gains from management there is a need to understand the

ecosystem in an economic context. Any ecosystem management programmeshould:- Reduce those market distortions that adversely affect biological diversity- Align incentives to promote sustainable use- Internalize costs and benefits in the given ecosystem to the extent feasible.

• A key feature of the ecosystem approach includes conservation of ecosystemstructure and functioning.

• Ecosystems must be managed within limits set by their ecological functions.• Management should be undertaken at the appropriate scale.• Management must recognize the varying temporal scales and lag effects which

characterize ecosystems.• Processes and objectives for ecosystem management should be set for the long

term.• Management must recognize that change is inevitable.• The ecosystem approach should seek the appropriate balance between

conservation and use of biological diversity.

The conclusion that I draw from this is that we should be cautious in attempting toimpose uniform institutional models for the management of conservation programmesin complex landscapes. Instead we should draw upon the understanding and rationaleincorporated in both the Ostrom and Malawi Principles in designing programmes.

Information Systems for Better ManagementCollecting basic information on the resources that are the object of conservation is animportant and necessary precursor to good management. However the collection ofinformation does not in itself contribute to achieving conservation. Inventories andsurveys can be very time consuming and expensive. They can require the protractedpresence of highly skilled and highly paid experts. They can also make heavydemands upon the time of local field staff. There are examples of biologicalinventories, surveys, management planning exercises, monitoring and evaluationprogrammes etc. that greatly exceed in their sophistication and resource demands thereal information needs for practical day to day management (Sheil, in prep). Thisimbalance is a reflection of the fact that the people who plan conservation projects areresponding to a different constituency from the day to day managers of the sites. Onefinds situations where scientists continue with exhaustive studies of obscure wildlife,

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whilst information that a significant part of the area has been cleared for agriculturedoes not find its way into the hands of managers.

Good information is essential for conservation management. But it is important thatinformation needs are defined by managers (and other stakeholders) and thatinformation is immediately accessible to, and understandable by, managers. Therelationship between scientists and managers in protected areas systems should reflectthe emerging relationships between scientists and managers in any knowledgedependent enterprise. In successful businesses, the divide between science andmanagement is lessening. All management is a form of action research. Allmanagers and other stakeholders are therefore participants in the research. Local andindigenous knowledge may be amongst the most valuable for managers, both formalmanagers working for conservation agencies and the local people who actuallymanage resources. Protected area programmes have to go much further in usingparticipatory techniques in their knowledge management systems. Local people canconduct biodiversity surveys and their assessment of the value of differentcomponents of biodiversity may have much more value for practical managementthan lists of species compiled by taxonomists in a distant museum.

Information needs for protected areas have to be negotiated and defined collectivelyby managers, resource users, scientists, and conservation programme sponsors. Theinformation has to flow back to all these stakeholders in easily used forms. Keyinformation will be that which is required to trigger management responses. Criteriaand indicators can be the basis for negotiating resource use and are vital tools foradaptive management. They must be developed in a way that allows them to fulfilthis need (Colfer in prep). The principles underlying recent work on Criteria andIndicators for Sustainable Forest Management by CIFOR could have wide applicationfor protected areas. The essential point is that the desired outcomes of managementhave to be negotiated with all stakeholders. These outcomes have to be expressed inways that allow for monitoring – the indicators. The indicators are then the signal thatallows management to adapt to changing circumstances.

The Role of International OrganizationsThe major theme of this paper has been that there is a need to strengthen localcapacity to manage conservation programmes. A significant conclusion is thatcentralized decision making and the desire for uniform “one size fits all” solutions tolocal conservation issues has created some of the problems that this paper describes. Iwould like to conclude therefore with a set of proposed guidelines that internationalconservation organizations and funding agencies might observe. If they do so theyshould build capacity for diverse, locally adapted, flexible and equitable responses tothe broad range of conservation problems which face us.

• Apply the principles for Ecosystem Approaches and, where appropriate commonproperty management as described in this paper.

• Make long-term commitments to large geographic areas and work at speeds thatallow local participatory processes to take their course.

• Ensure that the fundamental causes of problems are being addressed and not justthe symptoms.

• Invest in people. Committed and competent people are the scarcest and mostvaluable resource in achieving conservation. Expectations for good performance

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must be clear and rewards systems must favour those who achieve desiredoutcomes. Opportunities for continuing professional development must beprovided.

• Work through intermediary institutions and strengthen these institutions.Establish performance indicators for the institutions and link support and rewardsto meeting these performance goals.

• Minimize requirements for information and reports. Define needs forinformation useful for practical management and monitoring in advance. Restrictinformation needs to those that are necessary for management. (The proceduresof many donors now favour good reporter-writers rather than good conservation-practitioners).

• Avoid trying to make local programmes conform to global frameworks andclassifications. Rather use global systems to aggregate information from diverselocal conditions. (Thus a local programme should not be changed to make a siteconform to an IUCN Protected Area Category, the categories should besufficiently broadly defined to allow every locally developed conservationapproach to find its place in the classification).

• Recognize that local people will have different preferred outcomes from those ofan international conservation organization and ensure that negotiations are fairand that all assumptions about values are justified and transparent. Be realisticabout the role of compensation payments.

• Ensure that new funding opportunities, for instance the Clean DevelopmentMechanism under the Kyoto Protocol, are used in ways that support localsolutions and are not usurped by special interest groups in ways that diminish thelikelihood of local solutions prevailing.

ConclusionsAll good managers are attentive to their customers and to the environment thatsurrounds them. Protected area managers can learn much from the generalmanagement literature. They must learn to be pragmatic and realistic in dealing withcompeting pressures on land. Good managers listen, negotiate and adapt theirapproaches to minimize conflicts. They seek to reduce costs and to invest theirresources in the areas where the pay-offs will be highest. Too many protected areamanagers are still fighting rear-guard actions, trying to impose solutions that willnever be supported by those local stakeholders whose influence is crucial.

ReferencesCIFOR, UNESCO, Government of Indonesia, 1999. World Heritage Forests: TheWorld Heritage Convention as a mechanism for conserving tropical forestbiodiversity. CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia, pp 1-54.

CIFOR, 1999. Criteria and Indicators Toolbox Series. CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia.

Corbet, R.T. and I.M. Turner, 1996. Long term survival in tropical forest remnants inSingapore and Hongkong. In W.F. Lawrence and R.O. Bierregaard (eds) TropicalForest Remnants: Ecology, Management and Conservation of FragmentedCommunities, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

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Pierce Colfer, C.J. in press. Towards Social Criteria and indicators for protected areas:One cut on Adaptive Management. In Buck. L.E., Geisler, C.G. Schelhas, J.W.Wollenberg, E. (eds.). Biological diversity: Balancing interests through adaptivecollaborative management. CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida.

Sayer, J.A., N. Ishwaran, J. Thorsell and T. Sigaty, in press. Tropical forestbiodiversity and the World Heritage Convention. Ambio.

Sheil, D. in prep. Information needs for managing conservation areas.

Wells, M., S. Guggenheim, A. Khan, Wahjudi Wardojo and P. Jepson. 1999.Investing in Biodiversity. The World Bank, Washington D.C.

Zuidema, P.A., J.A. Sayer and W. Dijkman, 1997. Forest fragmentation andbiodiversity: the case for medium sized protected areas. Environ. Cons. 23, 290-297.

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Towards a Framework for Implementing a Representative System ofForest Protected Areas

Bob Pressey

AbstractSystematic conservation planning is an explicit, transparent process that combinesclear goals, data on the patterns and processes of biodiversity, and expert judgementsabout the design and maintenance of conservation areas. This paper reviews recentcase studies in systematic planning of forest and non-forest protected areas using ageneric framework of seven stages:

1. Goals. Clear statements about the major aims of the exercise to guide thedevelopment of data sets and the selection of new conservation areas.

2. Data. Compilation of existing data sets and, where possible, collection of newdata that reflect the goals of the planning exercise (e.g. mapping of foresttypes, distributions of key species).

3. Targets. Development of operational rules that reflect the broad goals of theexercise. Targets are specific, and preferably quantitative, statements about thedesign of protected areas and the required representation of particular features.

4. Review of existing conservation areas. Assessments of how well the targetsare already achieved, thereby defining the scope of the remaining task.

5. Preliminary selection of additional conservation areas. Identification ofnew candidate conservation areas, preferably based on explicit options forachieving targets and with choices being resolved according to factors such ascost, condition and competing land uses.

6. Implementation of conservation action on the ground. An often protractedprocess involving decisions about appropriate protection mechanisms,scheduling of conservation action, and replacement of some candidate areas.

7. Maintenance and monitoring of established conservation areas. Ensuringthe persistence of the natural values for which conservation areas wereestablished.

Bob PresseyNew South Wales National Parks and Wildlife ServicePO Box 402ArmidaleNSW 2350AUSTRALIAemail: bpressey@ozemail.com.au

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Towards a Framework for Implementing a Representative System ofForest Protected Areas

Bob Pressey

BACKGROUND

WWF has initiated its Global Forests Campaign - Forests for Life – which aims toestablish a system of protected areas that is representative of the world’s forest types.WWF, with its global coverage and extensive placement of experts in the field, is in astrong position to implement this goal in collaboration with IUCN, other NGOs, theWorld Bank and numerous governments. One purpose of this preliminary frameworkfor conservation planning is to promote discussion about the best ways forward. Theframework will continue to evolve as it incorporates new ideas and experiences. Manyof the ideas summarized here come from a WWF workshop on ecologicalrepresentation at Yverdon, Switzerland, in February 2000. Further ideas were addedafter a conference – “Beyond the Trees” – organized by WWF in Bangkok,May 2000.

There are two other important purposes of the framework presented here. One is toraise awareness at the 2003 World Parks Conference about the importance ofecological representativeness. A second is to assist WWF and other conservationagencies in achieving its goal on the ground by establishing guidelines for:

• assessing the adequacy of existing data sets and deciding when further data areneeded

• assessing the representativeness of existing protected area networks• setting well-justified targets at national and regional levels• assisting conservation groups in setting targets at landscape scales• lobbying governments and institutions and catalyse partner organizations to meet

the targets• assisting staff of WWF offices in implementing forest protected areas on the

ground, including both location and configuration, with a generic checklist ofdecisions and considerations

• regularly monitoring WWF’s progress towards its goal• emphasizing the importance of maintenance and monitoring of established

protected areas.

While there are numerous publications on the selection and design of protected areas,much of this information is fragmented, either in academic journals not regularly usedby managers, or in informal publications with limited circulation. Some of theavailable information and recommendations are contradictory. Moreover, examplesand case studies are often discussed at very different spatial scales, and there are fewrecommendations for reconciling decisions at global, national and landscape levels.WWF intends to produce clear guidelines, with supporting case studies, for theeffective location and design of protected areas.

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This paper outlines the approach being developed by WWF, in conjunction with theIUCN (WCPA) Management Effectiveness Task Force, for moving towards arepresentative system of forest protected areas.

Publications on the planning framework

At this stage, three publications on the planning framework are envisaged: (1) aconcise, highly visual brochure to establish the rationale for the Global ForestsCampaign and the proposed approach for moving toward a representative system offorest protected areas; (2) a thoroughly researched and referenced paper for theprimary scientific literature; and (3) a comprehensive but accessible manual aimed atpractitioners.

The manual will have two parts. The first will be a step-by-step description of theplanning framework (below) with case studies. The second part will summarize thesupporting theory, concepts, and principles, serving as a reference document. Themanual is intended to be highly visual, with clearly illustrated examples of theconcepts, principles and techniques of locating and designing protected areas. Thetarget audiences will be the WWF Forest Advisory Group, those involved in planningand implementing landscape-level forest conservation projects, and conservationgroups involved in lobbying.

Draft outline of the scientific paper and the manual

Both these publications will have similar structures, although their contents will differaccording to target audiences and the need for the scientific paper to be a moreconcise summary of ideas and information.

INTRODUCTION

Scene-setting topics include:

• the loss of biodiversity worldwide, and the moral imperative to protect it• summary of history and rates of forest loss• protected areas as only one aspect of conservation; the need to manage the

surrounding matrix; the need for restoration• the position of the planning framework, emphasizing biodiversity conservation, as

part of a broader approach that incorporates socio-economic considerations• the importance of including people in the planning process if they are potentially

affected by planning decisions.

DefinitionsWWF has so far adopted the definition of forests by FAO and the definition ofprotected areas by IUCN, ranging across categories I to VI. These definitions comewith some limitations. For example, remnant trees and associated understory plantscan be seen as “forests” waiting to recover, and plantations may not represent“forests” any more than fields of corn. The persistent problem of ambiguousinterpretation of IUCN categories means that different countries, even within the sameregion, define protected areas very differently. Denmark, for example, claims to have

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100% of their forests protected, while Switzerland claims only 3%. Additional workwill be needed to clarify and qualify definitions.

Scale- the continuum of scales from global-ecoregion-landscape-site;- define scales and implications for conservation planning;

A LANDSCAPE LEVEL APPROACH TO CONSERVATION PLANNING

Outline the landscape approach:

• provide a workable definition for “landscape”• define a landscape approach to conservation planning• describe possible criteria for identifying landscapes for conservation planning,

including cultural influences• discuss the need to “scale up” from landscapes by looking at large processes and

issues, and to “scale down” to look at site level issues• describe how the landscape approach fits with other approaches (e.g. ecoregional

planning)• a landscape approach enables an intelligent discussion about broad policy issues

and prescriptions, such as certification of plantations, logging in old-growthforests, and managed forests in extinction-prone zones

• a landscape approach avoids problems inherent in both bottom-up and top-downapproaches

• a landscape is the scale that matters to most human communities• the best way to delineate a landscape will vary from region to region, and the

boundaries are likely to be blurred and overlapping; the publications will try todevelop principles of protected area design at a landscape level, regardless of howlandscapes are defined precisely.

WHAT IS SYSTEMATIC CONSERVATION PLANNING?

A basic role of protected areas is to separate elements of biodiversity (e.g. species,forest types) from processes that threaten their existence in the wild. The extent towhich protected areas succeed in doing this depends on how well they meet twoobjectives. The first is representativeness, referring to the need for protected areas torepresent, or sample, the full variety of biodiversity in a region or country. The secondis persistence - protected areas, once established, should promote the long-termsurvival of the species and other elements of biodiversity they contain by maintainingnatural processes and viable populations and excluding threats. To meet theseobjectives, conservation planning must deal not only with the location of reserves inrelation to natural physical and biological patterns, but also with reserve design,which includes variables such as size, connectivity, replication, and alignment ofboundaries, for example, with watersheds. A structured, systematic approach toconservation planning provides a firm foundation for achieving these objectives.

Systematic conservation planning has several distinctive characteristics (Table 1).First and fundamentally, it is based on clear statements about the broad, idealizedgoals of the planning exercise. Second, it requires clear choices about the features tobe used as surrogates for overall biodiversity in the planning process. Third, it is

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guided by explicit, and preferably quantitative, operational targets that are designed toimplement the broad goals. Fourth, it recognizes the extent to which conservationtargets have been met in existing reserves. Fifth, it employs simple, explicit methodsfor locating and designing new reserves to complement existing ones in achievingtargets. Sixth, it applies explicit criteria for implementing conservation action on theground, especially with respect to the scheduling of protective management when notall candidate areas can be secured at once (usually). Seventh and finally, it adoptsexplicit objectives and mechanisms for maintaining the conditions within reservesrequired to foster the persistence of key natural features, together with monitoring ofthose features and adaptive management as required.

The effectiveness of systematic conservation planning comes from its efficiency inusing limited resources to achieve conservation goals, its defensibility and flexibilityin the face of competing land uses, and its accountability in allowing decisions to becritically reviewed. This is an idealized description of a process that is difficult toachieve in practice. Nevertheless, substantial parts have now been implementedaround the world.

WHY IS SYSTEMATIC CONSERVATION PLANNING NECESSARY?

The case for systematic conservation planning can perhaps be made most cogently byconsidering the implications of conservation decisions that are not systematic.

Protected areas have often been located in places that do not contribute to therepresentation of biodiversity. The main reason is that reservation usually stops orslows the extraction of natural resources. In some regions, housing and commercialdevelopment compete with land reserves. The economic and political implications canbe serious and reserves can be degraded or even formally de-gazetted when theyprove to be economically valuable. As a result, reserves tend to be concentrated onland that, at least at the time of establishment, was too remote or unproductive to beimportant economically. This means that many species occurring in productivelandscapes or those with development potential are not protected, even thoughdisturbance, transformation to intensive uses, and fragmentation continue.

Another reason for the inappropriate location of reserves is the diversity of reasons forwhich reserves are established. A diversity of goals means that different proponentssee different places as important. Because highly valued areas arising from alternativeconservation goals often fail to overlap, there is competition among proponents forlimited funds and the limited attention spans of decision makers. Moreover, goalssuch as the protection of grand scenery and wilderness often focus on areas that areremote, rugged and residual from intensive uses, giving them a political advantageover goals like representativeness which focus also on disturbed, economicallyproductive landscapes.

A FRAMEWORK FOR SYSTEMATIC CONSERVATION PLANNING

Systematic conservation planning can be seen as a process in seven stages (Table 1),each of which is discussed in detail in the following sections. The process is notunidirectional – there will be many feedbacks and reasons for revised decisions aboutpriority areas. For example, conservation targets will need to be re-examined as

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knowledge accumulates; replacement candidate reserves will have to be identifiedwhen unforeseen difficulties arise in implementation. The framework is also highlyrelevant to many problems in “off-reserve” conservation, including habitat restoration.Decisions about both on and off-reserve conservation, if they are not to be ad hoc anduncoordinated, should be guided by explicit goals, identification of priorities inregional or broader contexts, and clear choices between potential conservation areasand alternative forms of management.

The framework is applicable to a range of geographic scales. It could be appliedacross whole countries or ecoregions or over much smaller areas such as localgovernment areas or other administrative districts.

The framework draws on the following three references:

Pressey, R.L. (1997). Priority conservation areas: towards an operational definitionfor regional assessments. In: National Parks and Protected Areas: Selection,Delimitation and Management. Eds. J.J. Pigram and R.C. Sundell. University of NewEngland, Centre for Water Policy Research, Armidale. pp. 337-357.

Pressey, R.L. and Logan, V.S. (1997). Inside looking out: findings of research onreserve selection relevant to “off-reserve” nature conservation. In: ConservationOutside Nature Reserves. Eds. P. Hale and D. Lamb. Centre for ConservationBiology, University of Queensland. pp. 407-418.

Margules, C.R. and Pressey, R.L. (2000). Systematic conservation planning. Nature405, 243-253.

Stage 1. Identify broad, idealized conservation goals

A planning exercise should begin with clear statements about its overarching,idealized intentions. These could include the retention of the present biodiversity of aregion or country or the maintenance of specific environmental services or ecosystemfunctions. Goals are the ultimate criteria for judging the success of planning. Theyshould reflect a vision of what the region should look like in the future. They shouldnot be constrained (at least not until later in the process) by limitations of data orperceived difficulties in implementation.

Basing a conservation plan on idealized goals has three advantages:

1. The goals are not compromised at the outset by real or perceived constraintsimposed by socio-economic forces. This preserves a clear picture of the extent towhich nature conservation is in conflict with the material and economic aspirations ofsocieties.2. Goals serve to define the data requirements of the planning process (stage2), rather than vice versa.3. Goals not only help to formulate operational targets for conservation planning

(stage 3) but also encourage subsequent reviews of how well these targets reflectthe basic goals. Just as the “map is not the landscape”, targets are only aninterpretation of the goals, are subject to revision as our knowledge ofconservation biology improves, and, in many cases, represent compromises by

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planners between what should be achieved and what is considered feasible withinpolitical and economic constraints.

Stage 2. Compile and/or collect data

A fundamental part of any conservation plan is to compile, collect and manage thedata that will guide conservation decisions toward achieving the goals of the exercise.Time and money must usually be allocated to gathering data sets, assessing theirlimitations, and archiving them with appropriate documentation. Some planningprocesses minimize this stage by assembling experts for workshops to identify priorityconservation areas. This approach has been advocated when biological data are poorand time and money are insufficient for consistent data sets to be compiled. However,the limitations of biological data can often be partly offset by compiling informationon biological surrogates such as broad vegetation types (below). With some consistentinformation on biological surrogates, it is possible to combine the benefits ofconsistent data analysis with expert judgement (see stage 5).

Data on biodiversity

These are inevitably surrogates for the whole of biodiversity. Examples areenvironmental classes, forest types, point localities of well-known or well-collectedspecies, and the distributions of a few large, charismatic animals. Broadscale mappeddata on environmental classes or forest types are often available consistently overlarge areas, sometimes for whole planning regions. The disadvantage of these data isthat they serve only as a “coarse filter” – they are biologically heterogeneous andmight only roughly approximate the distributions of many of the species in a region.Conserving a piece of each type does not, therefore, ensure the protection of theregion’s complement of biodiversity. On the other hand, direct biological data such aslocalities of species are notoriously biased to roads and other lines of access. Usingsuch locality data implies that planners have decided that the benefits of direct data onspecies of interest outweigh the disadvantages of spatial bias. A solution to samplingbias is to model the wider spatial distributions of species from point records, but thereliability of models is also at least partly a function of the degree of spatial bias.

Data are needed not only for biodiversity pattern (e.g. species, forest types) but alsoon natural processes. One familiar example of process data would be information onthe minimum viable populations of selected species required to ensure long-termpersistence. Less familiar examples concern geomorphic and evolutionary processes.

Available data can limit the achievement of broad goals

Data relevant to some broad goals (e.g. ecological processes, requirements for thepersistence of particular species) is likely to be unavailable. Planners and managersmust then decide if time and money are available to gather this data.

Biodiversity surrogates can be tested for informativeness

Recent research is developing statistical techniques for testing how well surrogatessuch as vegetation types and environmental classes reflect the distributions of speciesand serve as a framework for conservation planning.

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Broadly mapped biodiversity surrogates can be subdivided

Very broadly mapped surrogates, such as extensive forest types, can provide a poorframework for conservation planning because they are heterogeneous in biologicalcomposition. It will often be possible to subdivide such broad land types withadditional data on terrain, geology, climate, etc. Another approach would be to useexperts to subdivide broad forest types according to observed, but previouslyunmapped, biological discontinuities.

Data sets for conservation planning can cover more than one type of biodiversitysurrogate

Data sets need not be homogeneous. For example, they can contain information on thedistribution of forest types, species localities, and modelled distributions of species.

Other important data on biodiversity

Other important data on biodiversity include:

• the remaining area of each environmental class or forest type;• indices of condition, connectivity or fragmentation;• status and population trends of indicator or focal species;• degree of restriction of features to the planning region (are they more typical of

other regions or endemic to this one?).

Data on ecosystem services

It might be possible to compile information on ecosystem services such as watersupply, water quality, etc. In a few cases, it might be possible to estimate theeconomic value of these services.

Data on planning units

It will usually be necessary to compile data on planning units – the pieces of thelandscape that are the building blocks of expanded systems of protected areas.Options include grid cells, watersheds, tenure parcels, habitat remnants or a mix ofthese across the planning region.

Data on cultural values

Data on threatening processes

Information on the rates and patterns of processes that threaten biodiversity is just ascritical as data on biodiversity itself. Important types of information include:

- historical land-use patterns- current rates and patterns of habitat loss- projected future loss of habitat- information on processes like grazing, logging, weeds and exotic animals; these

can be harder to monitor from remote sources; other difficulties for interpretation

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are that their intensity varies in time and space and their impacts on biodiversityare selective and sometimes poorly understood.

Data on socio-economic values

These will often overlap with information on threatening processes (e.g. agriculturalpotential is an index of threat). Land values or opportunity costs for natureconservation could be useful for planning and to assess the economic implications of aconservation plan.

Other contextual data

Some other types of data can be important for guiding decisions about priorityconservation areas. Examples are tenure, roads and rivers.

General considerations for all data sets:

- careful design and costing of new collections- effects of scale on use and interpretation- uncertainty, quality and limitations on interpretation- effectiveness of surrogates- data protocols and agreements- “seams” between data coverage and how to deal with them- managing, documenting and archiving- managing sensitive information- accessing key sources (e.g. online data on geology and terrain)- relative priorities of data layers when time and funds are limited (almost always).

Stage 3. Identify operational targets to guide conservation decisions

Targets are the operational guidelines for achieving the broad goals identified instage 1. The most familiar targets relate to the representation of biodiversity pattern inprotected areas (e.g. numbers of occurrences of each rare species, hectares of eachvegetation type). More generally, targets can, and should, be framed in several ways:

- representation (of biodiversity pattern); note that these can take several formsif the data are heterogeneous (e.g. occurrences of species, extent of forest types,area of predicted core habitat)- persistence (of biodiversity processes) using surrogates such as size, shape,connectivity, condition, replication; core vs. marginal habitat; refugia and “special”habitats such as breeding and roosting sites- identification of desirable population sizes or recovery trends for particularspecies (e.g. focal species that are most sensitive to landscape change)- maintenance of evolutionary processes where these can be related toparticular areas or to particular combinations of habitats- ecosystem services (e.g. retention of vegetation on groundwater rechargeareas or in the headwaters of rivers; retention of estuarine wetlands)- defensibility and exclusion of threatening processes from outside the futureboundaries of the protected area (alignment with watersheds, absence of adjacent

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agriculture or industry); these can pre-empt problems for maintenance of protectedareas after they are established (stage 7).

Some of these targets lend themselves to quantification. Others are more likely to bequalitative or expressed as preferences (e.g. where there is a choice, favour areas withparticular characteristics). All targets require determination for the biodiversity andthreatening processes of particular regions and will probably vary between parts ofregions (e.g. minimum reserve size for large mammals in mountains vs. endemicplants on coastal lowlands).

WWF’s stated target for its Global Forests Campaign is “The establishment … of anecologically representative network of protected areas covering at least 10 per cent of[each of] the world’s forest types … - in line with Recommendation 16 of the IVthWorld Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas Congress”.

This is a suitable starting point for a process of refining conservation targets forforests. Framing the 10 per cent target in relation to individual forest types is animprovement over requiring 10 per cent of each biome as in the Caracasrecommendations. The WWF target ensures that protection will be spread moreevenly within biomes, countries or regions. However, the WWF target, as it stands,involves several problems:

1. It does not specify whether the 10 per cent refers to the extant or estimated original(pre-clearing) area of each forest type. Setting percentage targets in terms of extantareas is counter-productive because the percentage of a type in existing reserves canbe enlarged by further clearing of unreserved stands. Percentage targets shouldtherefore be set in relation to the estimated “original” area of each forest type. Theresulting number of hectares could represent a much larger percentage of extantarea for forest types that have been partly transformed. For some types, the targetarea will be larger than the extant area. This effectively means that any occurrencesare irreplaceable. It also indicates the extent of restoration efforts that will berequired.

2. The figure of 10 per cent is essentially arbitrary, as was the same figure applied tobiomes in the Caracas recommendations. Realistically, targets representing lessthan 100 per cent of the extant areas of some forest types will lead to some loss ofbiodiversity. There are two reasons. Firstly, many (most?) forest types are highlyheterogeneous spatially, not only in terms of known species and populations, butprobably more in terms of the undescribed species and undocumented variationbetween populations. Secondly, in many forest types, the processes of species losswill already have been set in train. Because of changes to ecological andevolutionary processes, some extinction will occur even with retention of allremaining stands.

3. A single percentage for all forest types fails to recognize that some forest typesneed more protection than others. At least two factors are important here. First,larger targets are needed to sample the internal variation of forest types that aremore heterogeneous biologically. Second, for some forest types, 10 per cent inprotected areas could mean up to 90 per cent lost if they have good potential forintensive land uses. To account for variations in vulnerability, targets should be

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scaled up from some baseline (probably an arbitrary one) according to the naturalrarity and vulnerability of each forest type. Both these factors are related also to thescale at which forest types have been mapped. Targets for broad, heterogeneoustypes (e.g. mapped at 1:250,000) could be achieved while leaving much of theirinternal variation unprotected. Moreover, there will be political and economicpressures to protect those parts of broad forest types with least potential forextractive uses.

4. Representation targets such as 10 per cent, or even larger percentages, do notspecifically address the spatial requirements of ecological and evolutionaryprocesses. Process-related targets are also required.

Stage 4. Review the existing system of protected areas against targets

Intersecting the boundaries of protected areas with maps of vegetation types orlocalities of species is a long-established practice. Judging when vegetation types orspecies are adequately protected is part of some of these exercises and requiresexplicit statements about conservation targets (stage 3). Reviewing protected areaswith maps and GIS is the basis for the Gap Analysis Programme. At its most basic,the logic is simple – natural features that are outside protected areas or are protected atlevels below their conservation targets should be the focus of future conservationefforts. This logic can be applied even in regions with poor biological data. In thesecases, analysis of gaps can be done with broad surrogates for biodiversity (e.g.vegetation types or environmental classes). Environmental classes are often necessaryfor regions where biological collecting has been intensive but patchy (e.g. the CapeFloristic Region of South Africa). Although often necessary, analyses based on broadbiodiversity surrogates will often overlook rare or threatened species.

At least two important aspects of reviewing protected areas have not received theattention they deserve. The first concerns the relative risks faced by vegetation types,species, and other natural features in the “gaps” between protected areas. The second,concerns the assessment of how well natural processes, as opposed to biodiversitypattern, are protected.

The upshot of the first point is that some gaps are more important, and should be moreurgently filled, than others. Features such as vegetation types and species vary in theirvulnerability to threats such as clearing, logging, grazing and mining. For example, inmost regions, there will be under-protected features that occur on land with varyingpotential for agricultural development. Of these, the forest types and species most atrisk from transformation need to be highlighted for urgent conservation action (andsee stage 6 on implementation). In Sweden, the protected area system is heavilybiased toward sub-alpine regions (44% protection by area) with least potential forintensive land use, compared to 0.4% in the South Boreal, 0.7% in the Hemi Boreal,and 0.6% in the Nemoral regions. In order to meet long-term conservation goals,increases in protection of boreal and nemoral forests would need to be increased atleast five-fold. Another variation on this theme would be to identify the extent towhich “gap” forest types and species occur on private or public land. The feasibilityand complexity of conservation actions on these two tenures are often very different.

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The second poorly developed aspect of gap analysis concerns biodiversity processes.Gaps are most commonly identified in relation to one or more aspects of biodiversitypattern (maps of vegetation types or species localities). This is necessary but notsufficient for a realistic assessment of protected areas. Only a few assessments haveincluded data on size, defensibility and other process-related factors. Other relevantconsiderations include the dynamics of seral stages and connectivity. Notably, there isno generic assessment of process-related factors to serve as a checklist of possibleconsiderations for regional reviews of protected areas. One complication with ageneric set of criteria is that species vary widely in their responses to aspects ofreserve design. An important part of assessing the adequacy of reserves formaintaining natural processes could therefore be the analysis of “focal” species –organisms chosen because of their particular sensitivity to, say, logging activities orfragmentation of habitat. In these cases, population sizes and trends in distribution andabundance can be monitored relative to target levels in these variables, and the needfor additional formal protection of habitat identified. In some cases, factors such asage distribution and breeding success will need to be included. Information on thesecould reveal long-term problems for persistence, even if the species is apparently stillabundant and widespread.

Stage 5. Select and design additional conservation areas

With conservation targets identified (stage 3) and the existing protected areasreviewed against these targets (stage 4), the scope of the remaining task forconservation planning becomes apparent. In this stage of the process it is necessary toidentify the candidate conservation areas that should be added to the existing system.

Two alternative approaches to this task can be identified although, in reality, they arenot incompatible and should be blended wherever possible. One approach is theexpert workshop and the other is to use reserve selection programmes (or“algorithms”) to analyse more-or-less consistent data sets to identify candidateconservation areas.

In expert workshops, the data set is the sum of knowledge in the experts’ heads andsome structured approach is used by which experience and opinion are combined toidentify priority areas for conservation. This source of information is always valuablefor conservation planning and the expert-driven approach might seem a pragmaticresponse to biological data that are patchy and biased and which cannot besubstantially improved within the constraints of time and/or funds. However, planningbased only on expert judgements always suffers from the inevitable geographic andtaxonomic biases of the people involved. This is not an argument for delayingconservation decisions until comprehensive biological data sets have been collected. Itis an argument for combining expert judgements with analysis of widely availabledata sets on biodiversity surrogates (e.g. vegetation types, geology, soils, terrain,climatic variables, native vegetation cover). These data are available for many parts ofthe world. There are two important implications:

1. Systematic analyses for conservation planning are not made infeasible by poorbiological data. It will often be possible to compile a consistent map ofbiodiversity surrogates such as vegetation types or environmental classes.

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2. The most effective conservation planning comes from analysis of consistent datasets coupled with expert judgements on issues such as the design of protectedareas and the locations and requirements of particular species.

Reserve selection programmes addressing quantitative conservation targets have beenused increasingly since the early 1980s. They are now evolving into decision-supportsystems which lay out the options for conservation decisions and employ expertjudgements to resolve choices. These systems can also be used to develop alternativeconservation scenarios for regions and to minimize the conflict between conservationand economic values.

Conservation planning that uses design targets (size, connectivity) should ideally bebased on maps of options, with final decisions made by experts. Analyses that attemptto automate design decisions are limited as real-world planning tools because they areunable to make context-sensitive decisions (e.g. in which parts of the region iscompactness better than replication?).

Analytical methods for selected protected areas are also applicable to identifying areasfor off-reserve management and for habitat restoration. In the latter case, theconservation targets would be set in terms of areas of presently transformed ordegraded potential habitat (defined by environmental variables, knowledge of pastoccurrences, or remnant populations).

Some ground-truthing is always desirable for the candidate conservation areasidentified in this stage. Data on biodiversity, past land use, and threats, are alwaysapproximate and sometimes wrong. Ground-truthing can increase the confidence withwhich planners can argue for the importance of areas selected on the basis of remotelyderived information.

Stage 6. Implement conservation action on the ground

Selecting candidate conservation areas “on paper” and implementing conservationaction on the ground can be very different processes. Implementation is usuallycomplicated by the variety of people, agencies and commercial interests with a stakein the region and by the time needed to apply conservation management to particularareas. The eventual system of reserves can be very different from the one designed instage 5.

An example of a relatively straightforward case of implementation is the 1996expansion of forest conservation areas in north-eastern New South Wales, Australia.Planning was restricted to public land and the application of conservation action wasrapid once the new areas had been negotiated to meet (most) targets and boundarieshad been fine-tuned on the ground. Only a few forms of protection were at issue withlittle uncertainty about where they should be applied most appropriately. Theimplemented configuration was little different from that produced in the selectionstage.

A more complex and probably more widespread situation involves a mix of landtenures, ongoing loss and alteration of indigenous vegetation during a protractedprocess of applying conservation action on the ground, and the need to decide on an

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appropriate mix of protection measures. Three types of decisions are particularlyimportant. Firstly, the most appropriate or feasible form of management should beidentified for each area. This might be complicated by the need to apply particularforms of management in particular designated places, for example in biospherereserves, which have core and buffer zones. In some cases, the preferred form ofmanagement might be infeasible and will need to be changed. Secondly, if one ormore selected areas prove to be unexpectedly degraded or difficult to protect, it willbe necessary to return to stage 5 and identify replacements, where they exist. Thirdly,decisions are needed on the relative timing of conservation action when resources areinsufficient to implement the whole network quickly. With ongoing loss and alterationof habitat, a strategy is needed to minimize the extent to which conservation targetsare compromised before being achieved.

One strategy for doing this is to identify priorities in terms of spatial and temporaloptions. Arguably, priority for the allocation of limited conservation resources shouldgo to areas that are both imminently threatened and contain features that, if lost ordegraded, will seriously compromise conservation targets. At global and continentalscales, this rationale has led to the hotspots approach and to other similar methods foridentifying priorities. The same rationale has been applied within regions at the scaleof individual protected areas.

Some other points on implementation are listed here from the WWF workshop onecological representation in Yverdon, February 2000:

- implementation is not so much a series of steps but a dynamic process, constantlyadjusting to unexpected problems and opportunities

- some thought should be given to the period over which implementation isexpected to proceed, as well as the implications of the process taking less or moretime than expected

- establishing and maintaining partnerships will be critical- constraints on resources should be identified and kept clearly in mind- it will be important to also identify existing policies that have a bearing on land

use, including perverse incentives to clear land, and undervaluing of naturalresources

- existing mechanisms and policy instruments should be thoroughly explored andunderstood

- the importance of lobbying and fundraising should not be under-estimated- the importance of education and outreach should not be under-estimated- the planning process must balance group dynamics, community participation, and

conservation effectiveness- local knowledge, supplemented by learning in the planning process, is critical- the managers of established conservation areas will need a clear basis for making

day-to-day decisions- strategies will often need to include private lands (note that IUCN’s definitions

also apply equally to public and private ownerships)- in areas with high levels of private ownership, tenure can change every 5 to 20

years- even in areas of primarily state-owned forests, political changes and economic

forces are likely to make truly long-term management unlikely

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- choosing the correct scale for planning and implementation may be difficult; thereis a fine balance between too fine a scale and too coarse

- there is likely to be political and social resistance to landscape-level conservation,in part because it crosses traditional boundaries

- there is an urgency to act quickly, even in the face of knowledge gaps.

Stage 7. Maintenance and monitoring of established protected areas

Sound management effectively involves another cycle of the previous six stagesapplied to individual reserves. It requires broad goals of management to be identified(stage 1). It also requires information on the biodiversity of each reserve, knowledgeof the processes that underpin ecological functions, and an understanding of theresponses of key elements of biodiversity to natural processes and anthropogenicdisturbances (stage 2). Management should be based on explicit goals or targets i (as instage 3), reflecting the broad goals and preferably acknowledging the contribution ofeach reserve’s particular natural values to the regional system. Based on the extent towhich management goals are already being achieved (stage 4), it might be necessaryto review prescriptions or zonings and to prepare a new management plan indicatingwhich parts of reserves are appropriate for different uses, require regulation of naturalprocesses, or need to be rehabilitated (stage 5). Problems with implementation of themanagement plan (stage 6) will usually be minimized or avoided if key interestgroups have a say in its development. As with the selection and implementation ofnew reserves, this process is not fixed and unidirectional. New data on patterns andprocesses within a reserve might call for revised goals. More generally, ongoingmanagement should be complemented by periodic monitoring (back to stage 4) toassess the effectiveness of management actions in achieving nominated goals, withsubsequent adjustment of goals and activities, as appropriate.

Interaction between reserve management and the location and design ofreserves is inevitable. Decisions in the earlier stages of the planningprocess should, if possible, anticipate management issues. Keyconsiderations include size and shape, alignment of boundaries withwatersheds, avoidance of intrusive adjacent land uses, negotiations withneighbours, and the maintenance of migration routes. In turn, as themanagement needs of established reserves become apparent, or as newneeds emerge, it might be necessary to return to the selection stage ofthe overall planning process (stage 5) to modify the design of individualreserves or the overall conservation network.

All stages. The overarching review process

Sitting over this seven-stage planning process are tasks that require periodic attention.One of these is the repetition of the review process in stage 4, not only to gaugeprogress towards conservation targets but, just as importantly, to review the targetsthemselves against the broad, idealized goals of the planning exercise. It could be thatimproving knowledge of species’ requirements and the responses of species andecological systems to threats would require targets to be altered if they are to trulyreflect the major goals. Another periodic review concerns the available data on

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biodiversity, threatening processes and other issues. As data improve, conservationdecisions will need to adjust.

Acknowledgements

Jamie Ervin played a major role in the workshops at Yverdon and Bangkok thathelped to refine the approach outlined here. Jamie also compiled the notes fromYverdon on which some sections of this paper are based.

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Table 1. Seven stages in systematic conservation planning, with some examples oftasks and decisions in each. Note that the process is not unidirectional; there will bemany feedbacks and reasons for altering decisions (see text for examples).

1. DEFINE BROAD, IDEALIZED GOALS FOR THE PLANNING PROCESS

• Clearly state the ideals of the planning process, even if some of these appearunrealistic in the context of the constraints on conservation action. These goalsbecome the benchmark against which the success of conservation planning can bejudged.

2. COMPILE DATA ON THE PLANNING REGION

• Review existing data and decide on which data sets are sufficiently consistent toserve as surrogates for biodiversity across the planning region

• If time allows, collect new data to augment or replace some existing data sets• Collect information on the localities of species considered to be rare and/or

threatened in the region (these are likely to be missed or under-represented inconservation areas selected only on the basis of land classes such as vegetationtypes)

• Compile data on cultural and socio-economic values, rates and patterns ofthreatening processes.

3. IDENTIFY CONSERVATION TARGETS FOR THE PLANNING REGION

• Set quantitative conservation targets for species, vegetation types or other features(e.g. at least three occurrences of each species, 1,500 hectares of each vegetationtype, or specific targets tailored to the conservation needs of individual features).Despite inevitable subjectivity in their formulation, the value of such goals is theirexplicitness

• Set quantitative targets for minimum size, connectivity or other design criteria• Identify qualitative targets, or preferences (e.g. as far as possible, new

conservation areas should have minimal previous disturbance from grazing orlogging).

4. REVIEW EXISTING CONSERVATION AREAS

• Measure the extent to which quantitative targets for representation and designhave been achieved by existing conservation areas

• Identify the imminence of threat to under-represented features such as species orvegetation types, and the threats posed to areas that will be important in securingsatisfactory design targets.

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5. SELECT ADDITIONAL CONSERVATION AREAS

• Regard established conservation areas as “constraints” or focal points for thedesign of an expanded system

• Identify preliminary sets of new conservation areas for consideration as additionsto established areas. Options for doing this include reserve selection algorithms ordecision-support software to allow stakeholders to design expanded systems thatachieve regional conservation goals subject to constraints such as existingreserves, acquisition budgets, or limits on feasible opportunity costs for other landuses.

6. IMPLEMENT CONSERVATION ACTIONS

• Decide on the most appropriate or feasible form of management to be applied toindividual areas (some management approaches will be fallbacks from thepreferred option)

• If one or more selected areas prove to be unexpectedly degraded or difficult toprotect, return to stage 4 and look for alternatives

• Decide on the relative timing of conservation management when resources areinsufficient to implement the whole system in the short term (usually).

7. MAINTAIN THE REQUIRED VALUES OF CONSERVATION AREAS

• Set conservation goals at the level of individual conservation areas (e.g. maintainseral habitats for one or more species for which the area is important). Ideally,these goals will acknowledge the particular values of the area in the context of thewhole system

• Implement management actions and zonings in and around each area to achievethe goals

• Monitor key indicators that will reflect the success of management actions orzonings in achieving goals. Modify management as required.

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The National Protected Area System Plan in Madagascar

Martin Nicoll, Rasolofo Louis Andriamahaly1 and Brigitte Carr-Dirick2

AbstractThe Malagasy National Protected Area System Plan has to take intoaccount the country’s striking biological diversity and marked habitat lossand fragmentation within a complex pattern of land ownership andcultural practices. Species composition is best considered as a continuumof change, even over relatively short distances, and existing ecoregionalmodels and discernible distinct habitats are too coarse to decide howmany protected areas are needed and where they should be. We thusused available biogeographical information to determine sites rather thandistinctive regions for the improved protected area system. Theproposed system will have numerous, relatively small protected areas inorder to optimize biodiversity representation within remaining naturalecosystems. Association Nationale pour la Gestion des Aires Protégées(ANGAP) was only recently established as the managing authority. ThePlan presents an overview of broad operational strategies forconservation, sustainable development, research, education, andecotourism. This will help to attract donor support in an under-fundedenvironment.

Martin NicollRegional Technical AssistantAssociation Nationale pour la Gestion des Aires Protégées (ANGAP)B.P. 400Toliara 401MADAGASCAR

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email: men@dts.mg

1Rasolofo Louis AndriamahalyANGAP

2Brigitte Carr-DirickWWF Madagascar Programme Office

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The National Protected Area System Plan in Madagascar

Martin Nicoll, Rasolofo Louis Andriamahaly and Brigitte Carr-Dirick

CONTEXT

In Madagascar, the development of a National Protected Area System Plan is part of abroader process involving five key steps: (1) the creation of a legal code for protectedareas (Code des Aires Protégées, COAP); (2) the System Plan itself; (3) anorganizational review of the protected area management authority; (4) thedevelopment of a Business Plan for the entire system, and (5) the establishment of asustainable financial program. At the time of writing this paper, a draft of theNational Protected Area System Plan is currently under review within the protectedarea management authority - the Association Nationale pour la Gestion des AiresProtégées - ANGAP. We therefore underline that the Plan has not yet been approved.

Why a National Protected Area System Management Plan?All national protected area networks need a system plan for several reasons. Firstly, itis an invaluable exercise for protected area planners to analyse biodiversity patternswithin their country in order to ensure that natural ecosystems, habitats and speciesassemblages are well represented in the network. Secondly, it helps to raise questionsconcerning how best to achieve conservation in varying situations where protectedareas may be one of several viable options. Thirdly, a system plan helps to justify thenetwork and its associated conservation activities to decision makers, the public andfinancial backers – an essential factor if relatively large blocks of national territory areto be closed off to many other forms of usage.

Most system plans comprise biological or bioclimatic analyses to justify themaintenance or the creation of protected areas within the national network. Theanalysis usually determines ecoregions or bioclimatic regions so that each may berepresented by at least one park or reserve. In the case of Madagascar, ANGAPdecided that this would not satisfy the second and third value points noted above.Malagasy protected areas are publicly and continuously debated. On the one handthere is tremendous immediate political pressure to focus on poverty relief andeconomic development, with the utilization of natural resources being a majorelement. The flip-side of the coin is based on the country’s status as amegadiversity/hotspot (Mittermeier et al., 1997; Mittermeier et al., 1999),encouraging many aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) tocommit more than US$150 million for conservation and sustainable resource use,with a significant proportion going to protected area creation and management. Whilepartisans of both camps periodically take a rather one-sided position in the publicdebate, there appears to be a growing acceptance that conservation of naturalresources – including setting aside protected areas – is a fully integral part ofsustainable development within the context of Madagascar’s challenging economicenvironment.

We present the approaches adopted by ANGAP to develop a National Protected AreaSystem Management Plan in part to document how the Plan was adapted to thespecific context of Madagascar. The second reason is to document the approach that

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we took so that protected area managers in other countries, where conditions aresimilar, may decide whether their system plans may benefit from all or some of theapproaches used in Madagascar.

The Malagasy Plan is essentially divided into three complementary sections:representation of biodiversity and ecological processes; management strategies for theprotected area system; and management operationalization. Following a briefoverview of why the Plan is so structured and how it was developed, we will describethe three elements in more detail.

Historical context for protected areasThe first protected area was created in 1927, and the ministry responsible for forestand wetland management was charged with its management. The number steadilyincreased until by the 1990s more than 40 parks and reserves existed, designated aseither Strict Nature Reserves (World Conservation Union, IUCN Category I),National Parks (IUCN Category II) or Special Reserves (IUCN Category IV)(IUCN/UNEP/WWF, 1987; Nicoll & Langrand, 1989). Growing awareness ofMadagascar’s remarkable biodiversity and the high rate of loss of natural habitats ledto the development in 1990 of the National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP),which is divided into three phases. Phase I (1990 - 1997) involved the strengtheningof existing environmental ministries and the creation of some new institutions.ANGAP was specifically created in 1992 to manage all protected areas wherebiodiversity conservation is the main goal. Protected areas were at that time eithereffectively without staff or had only a bare minimum with few resources. Up to 1997ANGAP’s principal role was to coordinate the progressive development of effectivepark management, largely – but not entirely – through integrated conservation anddevelopment projects (ICDPs) managed by third party organizations such as NGOs.The current Phase II of the NEAP involves increasing the direct responsibility forprotected area management by ANGAP, and aims to reinforce management capacitywithin ANGAP. Phase III focuses mainly on ensuring financial sustainability of theprotected area system and a fully competent ANGAP.

STRUCTURING AND DEVELOPING THE PLAN

The paper’s authors were given the task of structuring and collating the Plan under asmall steering committee within ANGAP. The Plan’s draft structure and itsdevelopment process were agreed upon by the Association’s Management Committeein April 1999. The Committee, comprising Head Office and all regional directors,decided that the Plan should embrace the management strategies and overall prioritiesfor the entire protected area system. The decision was based primarily on theperception that ANGAP, as a relatively recently created body with little accumulatedexperience in protected area management, required the management strategies andoverall system prioritization for its own internal development. These two elementswere thus added in order to establish a clear rationale for the entire protected areasystem and provide a basic profile for each individual park and reserve. This wasconsidered possible because it was decided from the start that the Plan would begenerated from a broad consensus among all senior ANGAP management includingthe Head Office, Regional Offices and individual protected areas, together withrepresentatives from partner organizations who knew the issues well. The value ofsuch a broad ranging Plan in garnering political and aid agency support was also

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quickly recognized: the Plan became a major point of interest within the conservationcommunity even before a draft version was developed. It led to requests forinformation on ANGAP priorities and strategies from numerous partners, togetherwith offers of unsolicited additional conservation information on a range of potentialfuture protected areas that was hitherto little known. The Plan took on such interestthat ANGAP was given permission to modify its normally binding proposed annualwork plans and budget allocations for the year 2000, once the System ManagementPlan was approved at a later date. This decision was taken during the annual meetingbetween the Malagasy Government, NEAP agencies and aid agencies in November1999, just as the Plan’s first draft was being developed.

Step 1: Analysis of ecoregions and priority conservation areasThe first step in developing the Plan was a two-day scientific workshop held in thecapital, Antananarivo, in July 1999. More than 30 participants from the scientificcommunity, conservation specialists, and senior ANGAP staff from all over thecountry were given the task of defining ecoregions and identifying individual sites asthe basis for the future protected area system. The workshop involved a review ofexisting ecoregion models (Cornet, 1974; Du Puy & Moat, 1996; Faramalala, 1988,1995; Faramalala & Conservation International, 1995; Humbert, 1965, Humbert &Cours Darne, 1965) and available biodiversity information collected from national,regional and site surveys. The review was greatly facilitated by the results of anearlier international workshop on conservation priorities in Madagascar, held in 1995(Rakotosamimanana & Ganzhorn, 1995; Ganzhorn et al., 1997). It also had theparticipants review the value of existing protected areas and other sites that held ahigh conservation value but that were not in the national system. Special emphasiswas placed on identifying marine, coastal and wetland priorities as these ecosystemshad received relatively little attention to date, except among a few specialized NGOs.Identifying marine and coastal priorities required close coordination with the Marineand Coastal Environment unit (Ecosystèmes Marins et Côtiers, EMC) within theNational Environment Office that coordinates NEAP agencies. Wetland conservationwas also raised high on the agenda since Madagascar signed and ratified theRAMSAR Convention in 1998.

The scientific workshop was especially useful in reviewing the relative value ofexisting protected areas and in signalling new and as yet unprotected sites that areknown or suspected to be high biodiversity priorities. Marine and coastal ecoregionswere proposed to help ensure that the diverse habitats were well represented in theprotected area system as they have received less attention than terrestrial ecoregionsso far. Some terrestrial sub-ecoregions were also proposed, aimed at ensuringadequate representation of suspected geographical variations in biodiversity. It wasemphasized that the proposed marine ecoregions and terrestrial sub-ecoregions wereidentified more on the basis of management decision making than on purebiodiversity or bioclimatic differentiation. The workshop also emphasized the needfor a broad geographic coverage by protected areas within the constraints of aseverely reduced distribution and fragmentation of natural habitats. The rationale forthis is based on the known high degree of geographical variation in speciescomposition, even over relatively short distances. The workshop participants notedthat all well-surveyed sites had at least some locally endemic plant and vertebratesthat appear to be unique to the locality. They also noted that Malagasy terrestrial

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habitats are best viewed as a continuum of change, even though broad ecoregionaldistinctions were made.

Step 2: Analysis of management strategies and prioritiesThe second step in the Plan’s development was a four-day workshop on managementstrategies and priorities, held in October 1999. More than 80 participants representedall levels of management within ANGAP, together with representatives of NGOs, aidagencies and other NEAP partners. The workshop examined strategies and prioritieswithin each of the five principal management sectors of ANGAP: conservation;research and ecological monitoring; information, education and communication;sustainable development; and ecotourism. Day 1 was devoted to an analysis of thecurrent management situation in each existing protected area and, where possible, topotential future sites identified during the scientific workshop. The analysis wasbased on set questionnaires that eventually allowed comparisons between perceivedthreats and opportunities on one hand, and management resource allocations on theother. A second day involved a similar analysis but looking five years ahead. Usingthe experience garnered during Day 1 and following a similar questionnairemethodology, the participants were able to use apparent discrepancies betweenthreats, opportunities and management priorities to set a clearer vision of what needsto be done in the future. The two-days’ work was also carried out by ANGAP’smanagement region, with each group comprising representatives from the regionaloffice or parks and reserves under its jurisdiction. One of the most useful productswas a summary map produced by each group that provided an instant visual overviewof how priorities were perceived geographically for each management region.

The next two days treated each of the management components on a national scale.Most of the work involved defining management strategies under different conditions.For two management components, we were able to rank the protected areas and assignthem priorities. In this case, the priorities themselves had to be set even before thestrategy could be developed. For example, using a combination of level of threat andestimated biodiversity value, four priority levels for conservation were identified,each with a different degree of intervention. Research, information, education andcommunication, together with sustainable development, were less readily prioritized;rather, it was considered best to set out general guidelines considering what ANGAPshould do under different conditions.

An additional theme was added to the analysis: the legal status of ANGAP andprotected areas. A proposed new legal code is currently being reviewed for approvaland allows for national protected areas to be run directly by ANGAP or anorganization mandated by it, plus ‘agreed’ parks or reserves that may be manageddirectly by a regional government, community organization or a private entity.Protected areas can only obtain an ‘agreed’ status if their management conforms tostandards set out by ANGAP.

A second legislative question was also asked: how should parks and reserves beclassified, and on what basis? This was raised partly as, at the beginning of theNEAP, ANGAP ranked protected areas according to a series of criteria that led to thecreation of four classes. As the parks and reserves were rather poorly known at thetime it is hardly surprising that the classification was not entirely satisfactory,especially as priority was given to ecotourism potential. The question was also asked

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in order to determine whether the existing official protected area designations such asspecial reserves was still appropriate, or should a simpler nomenclature be used. Thereasons for this include recent and proposed status changes for some sites from strictnature reserve to national park, and because some of the most important tourism sitesare special reserves, normally established to protect a specific landscape, habitat orspecies.

The management workshop was critical insofar as bringing real ownership of the Planto all levels of ANGAP. The Plan’s contents was clearly decided by a large numberof ANGAP personnel, and they had the opportunity to validate and refine theconclusions of the scientific workshop.

Step 3: Regional reviews of the PlanIn February 2000 four regional two-day workshops for the six provinces wereorganized to review and revise the first draft of a technical report that would be thebasis of the Plan. The report provided the technical arguments for structuring thefuture protected area system and provided a consolidated summary of biodiversity andmanagement strategies and priorities. Biodiversity arguments were considered tootechnical for inclusion in the final published version of the Plan, but needed to beavailable to readers interested in understanding the rationale used. Managementarguments were more comprehensible to a wider non-specialist audience and were tobe put directly into the Plan without changes.

The workshops were organized by the respective regional directors and constituted aseries of presentations followed by discussion and working group sessions to improvethe content. The regional workshops were essential in finalizng the Plan. Eachworkshop was attended by 12 to 27 persons including Head Office staff, regionaloffice staff, one or two people from each protected area concerned, andrepresentatives from other NEAP agencies. Little contention existed regardingecoregions and the structure of the future protected area system, but the workshopsradically improved management strategies and priorities. Indeed, each workshopended with a consensual management prioritization for each protected area andregional office. The workshops also strengthened the sense of ownership for the planwithin ANGAP.

Step 4: Final review of the draft Plan reportOnce the modifications recommended by the regional workshops were incorporatedinto the Plan technical report, the latter was reviewed by a committee of Head Officeand regional ANGAP directors. The few final modifications were then built into thePlan itself and submitted to ANGAP for final review. Once approved internally, thePlan must go to ANGAP’s board and to the Ministry of the Environment for finalapproval.

THE PLAN: CHALLENGES AND RESPONSES

Developing the Plan will require at least a full year. This is not a surprise given that itis essentially a political statement of ANGAP’s intentions and may commit land toconservation throughout the country. In this section, we therefore discuss the mostchallenging elements of the Plan and how they were dealt with.

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Biodiversity representationThe principal challenge regarding terrestrial environments was a perceivedinconsistency concerning biodiversity patterns in different major taxonomic groups.Most analyses have focused on plant biodiversity and only a few deal with specificanimal groups. Although there is a general separation between the more humid forestsin the east and the seasonally dry forests in the west and south, certain taxonomicgroups did not fit existing plant or bioclimatic ecoregion models. While no model isperfect for all groups, the scientific workshop participants decided that ecoregions ascurrently defined do not answer the basic question: Can biodiversity be represented byhaving a protected area in each and every ecoregion and sub-ecoregion, even usingthe most complicated existing and widely accepted model? Because of the very highlevels of taxonomic turnover, ecoregions thus only give a relatively coarseapproximation to biodiversity variation, and other factors must be employed. Thelatter were essentially: (1) selection of sites with known or suspected unique speciesassemblages; (2) the distance between any two protected areas must not be too great(but unspecified), wherever possible; and (3) accepted ecoregions may need to besubdivided somewhat artificially for management purposes where rapid habitattransitions occur due to marked relief/climate gradients, or because at large anecoregion may be essentially transformed by human activities, leaving scatteredremnants that differ noticeably from each other because of their geographical orclimatic separation.

In spite of numerous biological studies in recent years and major museum collectingexpeditions in the past, it also became apparent that our understanding of biodiversitypatterns is still difficult to perceive from existing data. The workshops made a strongappeal for a greater focus on this issue. In addition, it is clearly timely to encouragescientists to produce syntheses or overviews of available results to improve ourunderstanding of biodiversity at the national or the regional level.

An associated challenge that arose was the number, size, and distribution of protectedareas in the future. The severely reduced and fragmented nature of remainingterrestrial habitats, combined with high species turnover, means that: (1) protectedareas are forced to be relatively small; and (2) numerous protected areas are requiredif a reasonable representation of biodiversity is to be achieved. Some 47 protectedareas already exist and many believe this is too great a number for the country’seconomic and skilled human resources to manage adequately. Before the Plan wasdeveloped, there was thus widespread agreement within the conservation and politicalcommunities that adding more than a few new sites would overburden an alreadystretched management organization. However, given that marine, coastal andwetlands are significantly under-represented in the existing system meant that the‘few’ additional sites would be used up even before major terrestrial centres ofdiversity or endemism were considered. The partial solution was to present most ofthe new sites for further investigation before any decision to create a new park wasmade.

The problem of distribution of existing and proposed protected areas is linked to thedistribution of remaining natural habitats, as most now exist in the most inaccessibleareas where road or rail access is severely limited. It remains unclear even with thePlan’s recommendations how some of the more remote sites will be adequately

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protected before further encroachment reduces their conservation value. All that canbe said is that at present ANGAP is committed to providing protection, in many caseswith the help of partner organizations such as NGOs.

It has been noted already that marine, coastal and freshwater ecosystems have notbeen studied adequately to define even the most basic ecoregions. However, we aresatisfied that at least the somewhat artificial regions defined during the scientificworkshop allow priority marine protected areas to be chosen relatively quickly, evenif additional sites are identified later. Wetlands are more problematic, but theworkshop was able to identify priority habitats and/or sites.

We also note that western and southern ecoregions were considerably less representedthan eastern ecoregions.

One of the most striking elements of ANGAP's conservation strategy is its activepromotion of integrated conservation and sustainable development within broadregional programs to support its protected area activities. There is little doubt thatmaintaining existing biodiversity cannot be achieved by protected areas alone as itwould require that the majority of remaining terrestrial habitats are classified as parksor reserves, a political and socio-economic proposition that is unacceptable. At leastfive major regional initiatives currently exist and in four of these existing protectedareas are anchor points, around which remaining natural habitats are sustainablyutilized or left as primarily conservation areas with only minimal resource extraction.Such programs appear to be vital for the future of Malagasy biodiversity and it issalutary that the national and regional leaders are incorporating them into theirdevelopment policies.

Management strategies and prioritiesANGAP and its partners are clearly pleased that this section was includedin the Plan and protected area managers have been seeking clearguidelines that would let each see how each park or reserve fits into theoverall system, and how to focus their efforts.

Policy and law: Before examining practical management issues, we note thatANGAP quickly adopted the IUCN protected area classification system. Among theperceived advantages is that it is based on an objective-ranked matrix of activitiesdesired in each protected area, rather than having too much emphasis on any singlefactor such as ecotourism. Secondly, it is easy for people unfamiliar with Madagascarto identify the major purposes of each park or reserve. ANGAP is also currentlyconsidering reducing the legal classification to either national parks or strict naturereserves, especially given that special reserves are so varied in their attributes. Marineand coastal sites would be specifically identified, such as marine national parks.

One of the central issues was: what are the criteria for creating a national versus anapproved1 protected area? This complicated and politically charged question will beresolved by taking the following steps. Firstly, the site’s strategic value regardingbiodiversity representation will be assessed. If it is strategically essential, the 1 The term used in French is agréé, which could also be interpreted as “agreed-upon”

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protected area will always be considered to be a contribution to the national system,regardless of the management authority. Secondly, each site will be considered interms of cultural, social and, where appropriate, economic significance. For example,if a sacred or otherwise culturally significant site is selected, the local communitiesand political authorities may propose to create an approved instead of a nationalprotected area. As interest in creating approved parks and reserves is likely to befinancial in many cases, ANGAP will mount an information campaign, at least in theearly stages, to demonstrate that the economic advantages should be carefullyassessed as the cost of management far exceeds direct revenues.

Conservation management: Conservation management was a major preoccupationin the management and regional workshops because ANGAP reaffirmed the need tomake this a priority. Thus, it was agreed to first prioritize all protected areas andsubsequently to propose activity packages for each priority class. We found it mostefficient to define first a basic package for the lowest priority class. Essentially, thisensured that there was an adequate response to: (1) threats; and (2) evolvingecological conditions. It also ensured that the level of monitoring was adequate.Each subsequent priority ranking had additional or intensified activities depending onits specific characteristics. For example, priority rank 3 is typified by lower levels ofthreat but exceptional biodiversity, whereas rank 2 is classified as higher threat andhigh (but not exceptional) biodiversity. Rank 3 emphasized intensified research andmonitoring while rank 2 emphasized threat control. There is of course a considerabledegree of flexibility as ranks are not hard and fast, and conditions can and do changerapidly.

Research and ecological monitoring: Research and monitoring in Malagasyprotected areas has been variable in its success or applicability to date. It wastherefore rewarding to see that the workshops put considerable emphasis on theseactivities. Essentially, the Plan first sets out basic guidelines for research andmonitoring together with a minimum package for protected areas. Secondly, itidentifies parks and reserves with strong potential to attract researchers and soincrease information and bring in useful revenues. Thirdly, the Plan addresses howindividual research programs should work with improved focus on planning to clearlyidentify key questions and to ensure that data is analysed and made available in anunderstandable format in a timely way. This is linked to a general ANGAPperception that research must be more focused on management issues in the future,although individual researchers will not be prohibited from more esoteric scientificsubjects.

Relationships between park managers and research organizations were a major pointfor debate. The value of developing long-term relations with academic institutions isnot doubtful as ANGAP does not possess the resources to realize its researchpriorities. However, past experiences have shown that some institutions haveproduced little management value and results have been difficult to obtain. In a fewinstances, foreign researchers and students have benefited greatly from agreementswith ANGAP, but the required support to Malagasy academic institutions has beeninadequate. ANGAP’s response to these difficulties will be to negotiate (orrenegotiate) collaborative agreements that respond to the interests of all partiesconcerned but – most importantly – set out unequivocal guidelines to ensure thatresearch brings net benefits to the Association and Malagasy research institutions.

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Information, education and communication: This element of the NEAP has beenthe most problematic throughout all agencies within the program. ANGAP’s mainemphasis will be to participate in the national environmental program at a leveldeemed appropriate to specific local circumstances and wherever possible inpartnership with other agencies. For example, if a major regional conservation andsustainable development program is developing, ANGAP’s regional office and localparks and reserves will increase their contribution to environmental educationactivities that always accompany such a program. This requires specialist staff. Atthe other extreme where protected area staffing is low and not involved in majorregional programs, ANGAP will ensure that its rangers have at least basic outreachtraining and always develop good communications with neighbouring communities.

Sustainable development: ANGAP has donated 50% of its direct ecotourismrevenues to local community development mini-projects since the first phase of theNEAP. These mini-projects are restricted to a zone of influence around the park orreserve, and are decided by community representatives in consultation with theirrespective communities. However, while these projects are valuable in generatinglocal tolerance or support to protected areas, they neither address the major localdevelopmental or economic needs, nor do they guarantee that local people will respectthe park or reserve. For this reason ANGAP is an active supporter of ecoregionalprograms that attract external financial backing, local political buy-in anddevelopment agencies. ANGAP’s strategy is essentially to participate as fully aspossible within the constraints of available resources. This may be in response to therequests of other partners or may be the result of perceived needs to play a moreactive promotional role to attract additional agencies. Specific activities may includeparticipation in inventories and assessments of natural habitats outside protected areasin order to determine their most appropriate management strategies, the identificationof development priorities around parks and reserves, or acting as a bridge betweencommunity organizations and developmental agencies.

Ecotourism: Setting strategies and priorities for ecotourism was generally themost contentious of the management section of the Plan. During the early daysof the NEAP ecotourism was seen as a major means of generating revenue fromnatural areas and expectations were often unrealistic. However, as theworkshops increasingly provided a more holistic overview of the entire system,personnel at each protected area were able to place the ecotourism potential oftheir respective sites in a more realistic and balanced framework.

The Plan first categorizes the potential for ecotourism in each existing and someproposed protected areas. Category 1 is assigned to those parks and reserves eitherknown to be key attractions based on existing or projected general tourism circuitsdeveloped by private companies and the Ministry of Tourism. Category twodesignates sites that are likely to be optional, yet relatively well visited venues, whileCategory three denotes sites reserved for specialist visitors such as ornithologicalgroups and wilderness hikers with relatively low numbers. A fourth categoryindicates sites that have an alternative role such as strict conservation of rare andfragile habitats, or have an unknown or uneconomic potential for reasons of pooraccess or low tourist attraction. The latter category comprises the majority ofprotected areas.

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Having established priorities, a basic package of interventions was designated forCategory three parks and reserves. This is considered the minimum for anyecotourism program in protected areas and concentrates on environmental protection,impact monitoring and visitor security. Category one and two sites wereprogressively allocated more intense interventions in order to absorb the impact oflarge visitor volume and to maintain visit quality. Each of these packages has adegree of flexibility and depends to a considerable extent on securing aid agencysupport for infrastructure development, together with cooperation with the privatesector for investment and services. Once the sensitive prioritization phase wascompleted, consensus on the intervention packages was easily obtained.

One of the most contentious issues was that of guides. The main issues are whetherguides should be obligatory, as they are at present, and the quality of services thatthey provide. In response, the Plan proposes that guiding is only to be obligatorywhere visitor safety could be a concern and proposes a greater focus on guide training,testing and grading, and monitoring.

Authors of travel guide books will also be invited to visit in order to providecomprehensive informational support. ANGAP is also currently developing aninformation-rich guide to parks and reserves on the internet, a service that will be free.

OPERATIONAL STRATEGIES AND PRIORITIES

This chapter is of great interest to ANGAP personnel and supporting aid agencies. Itsummarizes all that has been presented beforehand by management region and isaccompanied by a brief description of the main characteristics and issues of the regionin question. Already the draft Plan report has had a direct impact: the Head Office isable to pre-structure its national budget more easily by site and by managementtheme, corresponding to provisional budgetary requests from regional directors.Financial agencies and political decision makers also appreciate the extra informationthat allows them to understand at a glance the directions that ANGAP will take in thefuture and what the Association’s needs will be.

CONCLUSIONS

Going beyond the traditional national system plan to present management andoperational strategies and priorities is clearly considered to provide added value to thePlan in Madagascar. We hope that the lessons learned from assembling the Plan andits internal rationale will be of interest and, perhaps, of use to protected area plannersin other countries. The Plan technical report will soon be available in French andEnglish on the ANGAP internet site.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Plan was developed through a broad participatory process involving ANGAP'spersonnel at all levels of the organization, as well as numerous partners. We wouldlike to extend our thanks to all those who participated in the workshops, and latercommented on early drafts of the Plan.

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REFERENCESCornet, A. (1974) Essai de cartographie bioclimatique à Madagascar. Noticeexplicative de l'ORSTOM, 55. Paris, France.

Du Puy, D. J. & J. Moat (1996) A refined classification of the primary vegetation ofMadagascar based on the underlying geology: using GIS to map its distribution andassess its conservation status. Pages 215-218 in WR. Lourenço (ed.), Biogéographiede Madagascar. Editions de l'ORSTOM, Paris, France.

Faramalala, M. H. (1988) Etude de la végétation de Madagascar à l'aide des donnéesspatiales. Thèse de Doctorat. Université de Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France.

Faramalala, M. H. (1995) Cartographie de la végétation de Madagascar. Abstracts ofthe International Symposium - Biogeography of Madagascar. Société deBiogéographie, Paris.

Faramalala, M. H. & Conservation International (1995). Formations végétales etdomaine forestier de Madagascar. 1:1,000,000 color map. ConservationInternational, Washington, D.C.

Ganzhorn, J., B. Rakotosamimanana, L. Hannah, J. Hough, L. Iyer, S. Olivieri, S.Rajaobelina, C. Rosdtrom & G. Tilkin (1997) Priorities for Biodiversity Conservationin Madagascar. Primate Report 48-1: 1 - 81.

Humbert, H. (1965) Description des types de végétation. In H. Humbert and G.Cours Darne (eds.), Notice de la carte de Madagascar. Volume 6. Travaux de laSection Scientifique et Technique de l'Institut Français de Pondichéry (hors série).

Humbert, H. & Cours Darne, G. (1965) Carte internationale du tapis végétal et desconditions écologiques. 3 coupures au 1/1,000,000 de Madagascar. Travaux de laSection Scientifique et Technique de l'Institut Français de Pondichéry (hors série).

IUCN/UNEP/WWF (1987) Madagascar, an environmental profile. M. D. Jenkins(ed.). Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, U.K.

Mittermeier, R., P. Robles Gil & C. Goettsch-Mittermeier (1997) Megadiversity.Earth's biologically wealthiest nations. 501 pages. CEMEX, Mexico

Mittermeier, R., N. Meyers, C. Goettsch-Mittermeier & P. Robles Gil (1999)Hotspots. Earth's biologically richest and most endangered terrestrial ecoregions.430 pages. CEMEX, Mexico.

Nicoll, M.E & O. Langrand (1989) Madagascar: Revue de la Conservation et desAires Protégées. WWF, Gland, Suisse. xvii + 374pp., illustré.

Rakotosamimanana, B. & J. Ganzhorn (1995) Rapport final de l'Atelier scientifiquesur la Définition des Priorités de Conservation de la Diversité Biologique àMadagascar, 10-14 avril 1995, Hôtel Panorama, Antananarivo, Madagascar. ProjetPRIF-FEM/GEF, ONE, Direction des Eaux et Forêts, ANGAP, PNUD, ConservationInternational, Antananarivo.

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Economic Design Principles for Forest Protected Areas

Amar Inamdar

AbstractThis paper critically reviews assumptions about trade-offs between financialsustainability and biological richness of protected areas. In particular, we usepractical examples and case studies to ask how location (proximity to people andplace) and design (management and utilization strategies) of forest PAs influencefinancial sustainability. We review a range of financial and economic tools that havebeen used to improve the financial viability of PAs, drawing out good practice andidentifying lessons learned along the way. We conclude that financial viability andconservation are best achieved when PA managers follow design principles based oninternalizing economic externalities.

Amar InamdarDirectorSynergyThe Oxford Centre for InnovationMill StreetOxford OX2 OJXUNITED KINGDOMemail: amar@synergy-global.net

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Economic Design Principles for Forest Protected Areas

Amar Inamdar

Introduction

Conserving tropical forests has benefits as well as costs for society. But many of thebenefits are diffuse: they accrue to a variety of stakeholders at local, national andinternational levels. Meanwhile, rural people in the developing world face the costsof managing forests, and of foregoing alternative land-use opportunities. Fordevelopment to be sustainable, the trade-offs between costs and benefits need to berecognized and a management approach designed that deals with the public andprivate goods aspects of forests.

In this paper, I address three questions:

• What role can tropical forests play in national development?• How do we help people to decide on the ‘optimal’ level of forest conservation?• What kinds of economic tools can we use to achieve forest conservation at the

least cost?

Tropical Forests and National Development

The OECD has developed a framework to encourage its member countries to betterintegrate environment and development (see Table 1)2.

The first step is to define sustainable development as increasing capital stocks.Capital stocks include three primary components:

• Human assets (e.g. skills, education and health)• Natural assets (e.g. forests, fish, minerals and oil)• Produced assets (e.g. infrastructure and factories).

To some extent, the model assumes that there is some substitutability between thedifferent types of capital. This means, for example, that it is possible to convertnatural capital into produced assets, and produced assets into human assets.

2 Integrating Economics and the Environment, OECD, 1998

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Table 1. A process for integrating environment and development

Activity Context for SustainableDevelopment

Implementation

Establish overall goal of‘constant capital stock’

Macroeconomic goal anddefinition of sustainabledevelopment as ‘constantor rising value of assets’

Goal underlies modifiedGNP approach

Measure a redefinedGNP

GNP should relate tosustainable nationalincome that can besecured without runningdown capital assets

Primarily amacroeconomic tool

Attach economic valuesto environmental services

Failure to do so will leadto excess environmentaldegradation

Correct assessment ofcosts associated withdepletion and thecontribution ofenvironmental assets todevelopment

Correctly price economicinputs and outputs

Polluter Pays Principle.Failure to price correctlywill lead to excessenvironmentaldegradation

Correct shadow pricing oftransnational corporationinvestment costs andbenefits

Avoid investments andpolicies likely to imposemajor irreversible costson future generations

Being sustainable by notmaking the future worseoff compared to thepresent

Importance of correctvaluation. Possibleimplication for thediscount rate

Managing a portfolio of assets for sustainable development

At least some deforestation is acceptable because it can contribute to development.Capitalizing on natural assets is one of the few ways for poorer countries to develop.Countries that are well endowed with capital assets need to manage their portfolio toimprove the standard of living for their people. This seems evident from the data,which shows that less developed countries tend to deforest faster than richer countries(Figure 1).

In order to meet the goal of constant or increasing capital stocks, income fromdrawing down on assets, needs to be reinvested into other productive stock for thebenefit of society. Expenditure on ‘current account’ activities for consumption (likebuying cars and weapons) is generally not a financially sustainable strategy. Thus,sustainability is primarily an issue of good governance. Good governance means thatgovernment is truly representative of social interests, and accountable to the public forits decisions. Assuming good governance, every dollar spent on conserving forests isone less dollar spent on other social development objectives. A key goal is to achievethe most forest conservation at the least cost. This frees-up public finance for a bettersocial return on investment.

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Figure 1. Rates of Deforestation in low, middle and high income countries.

The second step in integrating forests intonational development is to improve acountry’s balance sheet and accountingprinciples. ‘Greening-up’ national accountsinvolves the integration of the real costs andbenefits of environmental services intoaccounts. There are several ways of doingthis. A good example comes fromIndonesia, where WRI calculated ‘NetDomestic Product’ (Figure 2). This shows that, when we treat natural resourceexpenditure as capital depreciation, real economic growth is substantially lower thancurrent estimates. The World Bank uses another measure - ‘Genuine Savings Rates’ -to analyse whether countries are pursuing sustainable development strategies or not.The result of this analysis is the same: traditional national reporting over-estimateseconomic growth.

The optimal level of forest conservation

Two pieces of information can help guide decisions over how to decide the optimallevel of forest conservation in any one country. These are:• The values of forests, so that we can better understand the costs to society of

deforestation• The costs of alternative forest conservation measures.

Green accounting: some general principles• Deforestation (or mining) is recorded as

depreciation of capital assets• The value of capital stocks is estimated as the

international market price of produced itemsless full costs of extraction = ‘resource rent’

• Economic effects of deforestation (like loss ofhydrological services to downstream users) arealso included.

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Figure 2. Comparing the traditional GDP rate with Net Domestic Product

The values of forests

Forests have a broad range of economic values including direct, indirect and optionvalues (Figure 3). The values of forest accrue to different stakeholder groups indifferent ways. Direct values – like timber and NTFPs – tend to deliver benefits tolocal stakeholders in the near to medium term. Option values – like the future valuesof genetic resources, tend to accrue to global stakeholders, generally over the longerterm. Of course, this generalization has exceptions, but it is a useful way to illustratethe values of forests.

Forests share many of the characteristics of common property resources in that theyhave public and private values (Table 2). Public values have particular characteristics– they tend to be diffuse and accrue to multiple stakeholders. A good example isclimate regulation services. It is often difficult to prevent people benefiting from theseservices, even though those people have not necessarily paid the costs of maintainingforests. Under these circumstances a market may not exist which allocates resourcesefficiently and the result is market failure. Often, there is no reason to expectindividuals to promote community interests, or communities to promote nationalinterests, so it is important for government (or some other socially accountable entity)to intervene through creating the right incentives, property rights and regulations topromote social welfare.

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Figure 3. The range of forest values

Value type Sub -type Example Time frame

Direct Consumptive Subsistence products ;NTFPs

Short term, local

Productive Timber products

Non -consumptive Nature tourism

Non-use value Existence & culturalvalues

Indirect Ecological services

Option values Future values ofoutbreeding etc.

Long term, global

Table 2. Public and Private Values of Forests

Public Values Private ValuesEnvironmental servicesClimate regulation, water and soil maintenance

Natural resourcesTimber, NTFPs, genetic resources

Future valuesGenetic diversityAmenity valuesShared resources and Cultural values

Amenity valuesTourism

Identifying and quantifying the values of forests is important because it helps us tounderstand what society loses as a result of deforestation.

The costs of sustainable forest management

It is important to recognize that forest conservation measures have discreet costs.First there are the costs of maintaining forests. These might include the costs of land,labour and capital employed. Estimates for these costs are seldom declared and it isdifficult to present detailed analyses. In terms of management costs, estimates varybetween $150 and $250 per hectare per annum3. We should recognize, though, thatthese costs are only recurrent expenditure. The majority of these costs are tied up incapital – land costs. Most often, these costs are ‘hidden’ because forest PAs arecreated by government decree with little compensation to local inhabitants4.

A second set of costs is opportunity costs associated with alternative options for landuse. Land currently used for forestry is usually fertile and thus could be used for 3 James A. et al, Parastatal Governance of State Protected Areas in Africa and the Caribbean, WWFInternational, Gland, Switzerland, 20004 Inamdar A. et al, Capitalising on Nature: Protected Area Management, Science, vol. 283, March1999.

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many alternative sources of income. Where these alternative uses present bettereconomic and social benefits to landowners and land users, deforestation becomesrational. Clearly, the policy framework of incentives and disincentives for livelihoodoptions has an important bearing on these decisions and tilts the balance betweendecisions towards forestry or towards deforestation.

Towards optimal forest conservation – identifying the ‘low hanging fruit’ ofcheap interventions which reduce deforestation

Optimal forest conservation is a pragmatic position. It aims to balance the costs tosociety of conserving forests against the costs to society of deforestation. Thevariables set out in the previous section help society to assess the trade-offs betweendeforestation and forest conservation (Table 3).

Table 3. Trade-offs between deforestation and forest conservation

Social costs of deforestation Costs of forest conservation

• Loss of watershed protection. • Outright protection• Loss of climate regulation

services (estimated at $20 pertonne)

• Regulatory tools

• Market-based instruments• Loss of communal resources andamenities

• Loss of biodiversity values(estimated by global willingnessto pay?)

• Community forestryschemes

We can use a simple model to estimate the ‘optimal’ level of deforestation bycomparing the costs to society of marginal damage to forests (MD) against themarginal costs of conserving forest (MCC) (Figure 4). In this model, we can see thatat 100% depletion of forest the costs of forest conservation are low (or nil) but thecosts to society of deforestation (MD) are at their highest. Conversely, at 0% forestdepletion, the costs of forest conservation (MCC) are at their highest, whilst the coststo society of deforestation are at their lowest. Clearly, an optimal conservationstrategy will reflect the point where the marginal costs of conservation meet themarginal benefits – i.e. where the two lines intersect.

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Figure 4. Finding the optimal rate of deforestation

100

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The curves reflect the reality that initial deforestation may impose few costs onsociety, but climate regulation or hydrological functions of forests may fall offrapidly as thresholds are crossed. Similarly, the effectiveness of conservationmeasures varies: some measures, like changes in tax regimes or removal ofperverse subsidies may be cheap to implement, but return high gains in terms ofreduced rates of deforestation. Optimal management strategies seek to identifythe most cost-effective measures to achieve conservation – the ‘low hanging fruit’in management parlance.

Management Instruments to Achieve Conservation

Effective conservation tools minimize the costs of forest conservation and avoid thecosts of deforestation by efficiently capturing the diversity of public and privatevalues associated with forests. Such tools focus on markets, regulations, and publicdisclosure.

Table 4: Policies and Instruments for Sustainable Forest Management

MD MCC

Low costinterventions thatdeliver largereductions indeforestation rates

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Using markets

Market-based tools are receiving increased attention in many countries as a way toimprove environmental quality and practice. These tools include innovative tax-and-subsidy approaches (e.g. Polluter Pays, User Pays, Performance bonds). Market-based tools tend to be cheaper to administer (due to the creation of market incentivesfor participants) and often also produce a ‘double dividend’ because they work bychanging investment behaviour, as well as creating revenue for management. Forexample, ‘Polluter Pays’ taxes promote environmental best practice among forest-related industry and generate revenue for sustainable forestry projects.Internationally, taxes can be imposed upon imports of timber (such as Brazil’s value-added Tax), as long as the transfer of revenue to the government is efficient andavoids leakage into other sectors of trade.

Creating markets

Perhaps the most innovative and promising way of conserving forests is by creating orenforcing property rights that encourage investment. Market creation, like carbonoffset trading designed by the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism,involves researching which aspects of the forest are marketable on a local, national orinternational level and then setting up the institutions for trade and financialinvestment. Tradable development rights (TDRs) are also used in U.S. forestry,especially in the settling of property rights for small farm-owners and indigenouspeoples. Costa Rica has gone furthest in developing coherent property rights for theenvironmental services that forests provide (Box 2). Market creation need not becomplex. Auctioning leases and concessions in national parks are a way of creatingmarkets that are commonplace throughout the world.

Box 1. Taxes and Performance Bonds in Costa RicaIn Costa Rica, a 10% tax on stumpage value was set in 1996. Loggers are now required to place a 20%deposit on stumpage value with the government. The government guarantees that this money will bereturned if trees are replanted sustainably. This is known as a ‘performance bond’ as the return of thedeposit is dependent upon the performance of the bondholder. Loggers are also charged for roadmaintenance and other services. Stumpage taxes, reforestation deposits and service fees are thus used toimprove the sustainability and return on forest assets.

Box 2. Marketing forest services in Costa RicaThe National Forestry Fund (FONAFIFO) was established in Costa Rica to administer finance forforests. This fund markets explicit forest services to consumers, including carbon fixation,

Using markets Creating Markets EnvironmentalRegulations

Engaging thePublic

• SubsidyReduction

• Property Rights • Standards

• TargetedSubsidies

• Decentralization • Bans • PublicParticipation

• EnvironmentalTaxes

• Tradablepermits/rights

• Permits/Quotas • InformationDisclosure

• User Fees• Deposit-Refund

Systems

• InternationalOffset Systems

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Regulatory approaches

Regulations have a role to play, especially where markets are poorly developed orinstitutions are weak. Forest conservation policies in the developing world havetended to rely heavily on regulations like bans or gazetting of PAs.

Logging, in particular, can be made subject to strict quotas, such as the zonationconcession quotas in Brazil and Malaysia. The disadvantage of many regulations isthat they are often expensive to police and implement.

Engaging the public

Public disclosure helps to keep both managers and operators on track. It does so byencouraging corporate and government responsibility through increasingaccountability to stakeholders (either shareholders or constituents). Disclosure ofactivities can be required and regulated by the government, although voluntary self-reporting (‘environmental and social auditing’) is becoming a competitive advantagein places where information dispersal and consumer choice are extensive.Certification schemes such as the Forestry Stewardship Council and ISO14000 givecustomers a standard by which to judge the sustainability of extraction andreforestation practices. The schemes also supply guidelines and recommendations tologgers, based upon the audits undertaken. However, consumer willingness to pay forsuch certified products has not yet reached levels high enough to compensate for thehigher costs of production.

Conclusion

Effective forest management requires nations to put forests into context as a nationalasset and then estimate, within this context, the optimal rates of deforestation. Acriteria matrix can be used to compare the various conservation tools and identify themost appropriate for any given set of circumstances (Table 5).

Table 5. Criteria matrix for conservation tools

Box 3. Indonesia’s approach to pollution control: information disclosureA programme in Indonesia demonstrates how information disclosure can be a powerful tool. Theprogramme is an independent project that works through a widely publicised information networkand is known as PROPER, the Programme for Pollution Control Evaluation and Rating. It awards‘star’ ratings to companies, depending on whether or not they meet national standards. PROPERalso works in conjunction with companies to improve their star rating before going public. As aresult, a significant proportion of companies improved their performance in just five months.

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Criteria → Ins t ruments ↓

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Subsidies D eposit -refund sys tems

Regula t ions and liability

Accredi ta t ion and labelling

The first step is to estimate the value of environmental assets accurately. Betterdefinition of GNP and improved national accounting to include human, natural, andproduced capital, is one positive step forward. This will allow for the selection of themost cost-effective instruments to achieve conservation.

The challenge is to ensure that the most forest conservation is obtained for the leastcost to society. This means understanding the costs to society of deforestation, aswell as the costs of alternative management approaches. The best strategies take fullaccount of the public as well as private values of forests and, as a result, market-basedinstruments are gaining wider application in this area. But market creation,regulations, and public disclosure policies must also be appropriate to nationalcircumstances and promote good governance. Sound economic instruments areunlikely alone to promote socially equitable outcomes.

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World Wildlife Fund Canada’s Endangered Spaces Campaign

Arlin Hackman

AbstractLaunched by World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF-Canada) in 1989, the Endangered Spaces Campaignmobilized a ten-year effort within Canada’s conservation community to complete an ecologicallyrepresentative protected areas system nationwide. WWF recruited government commitments to thisgoal and also developed and employed a gap-analysis methodology which, together with an annualprogress report, provided a consistent science-based foundation for assessing performance nationwide.This paper outlines the methodology, provides examples of its application in land and resourceplanning decisions, assesses the overall results achieved regarding forest protected areas, and identifieslearning points for ongoing protected areas designation and management. More than 1,000 newprotected areas were established during the campaign. As of 1999, 107 of Canada’s 384 forestednatural regions were judged to be adequately or moderately represented by permanently protected areaswith no logging and the total forest area of Canada so protected had reached 8.2%.

Arlin HackmanVice President of ConservationWorld Wildlife Fund Canada245 Eglinton Avenue EastSuite 410, TorontoOntario M4P 3J1CANADAemail: ahackman@wwfcanada.org

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World Wildlife Fund Canada’s Endangered Spaces Campaign

Arlin Hackman

Eroding a Global HeritageCanada has long enjoyed an international reputation as a gentle, peace-loving society and a worldleader in conservation. While our history of international aggression is blessedly brief, we have shownourselves to be as capable as any other nation in waging war on our natural environment. Our vastprairies are among the most altered habitats on the planet. Today, less than 1% of the original tallgrassprairie remains. More than 70% of the original wetlands around the Great Lakes, some of the mostspecies-rich habitats in our country, are gone. Not surprisingly, the 340 species now officially at risk ofextinction in Canada are concentrated in these endangered habitats.

One half of our vast national territory is forested, accounting for 10% of the world’s forests, includingone third of the world’s boreal forests and one fifth of the rapidly disappearing temperate rain forest.Much of our forest is still original, essentially the result of natural disturbance. Indeed, the WorldResources Institute considers Canada to have one quarter of the world’s remaining “frontier forest” -large, relatively undisturbed forest areas capable of maintaining native biodiversity, including anestimated 140,000 wildlife species (Global Forest Watch Canada, 2000).

But we’re quickly overtaking this frontier, too. Roughly half of our forests are already under someform of timber concession and we are now the world’s largest exporter of forest products, loggingabout one million hectares every year to feed our markets. At this rate, the old growth coastal forestcould well be gone within a decade or two. Already less than one per cent of the magnificent oldgrowth red and white pine stands remain in the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence forest region. Roughly thesame or less survives of the original Acadian hardwood forest in the Maritime provinces, the Carolinianforest of south western Ontario, the aspen parkland bordering the western prairies and the Garry oakwoodlands of Vancouver Island.

To the north, much of the extensive fire-generated spruce, pine and fir forest is still intact, and some isstill unallocated. But over the past century, the geographic range of woodland caribou, an indicator ofdisturbance-sensitive species, has steadily contracted, as logging concessions creep north into theboreal forest. And in the past decade, forest licensing, mill expansion, road-building and industriallogging have greatly accelerated in this region.

Some of this impact, covering 55,000 to 80,000 hectares annually, occurs through deforestation and theconversion of forest land to other uses such as mines, utility corridors, agriculture and urbandevelopment (Global Forest Watch Canada, 2000). But, on the whole, forest exploitation in Canadaresults in the return of trees so that the extent of wooded areas may actually be increasing regionally, ifnot nationwide. Therefore, our problem is that, limitless as it appears, wooded as it mostly remains,Canada’s forest estate is measurably declining in quality if not in quantity.

In the last century of exploitation there have been human casualties as well. Almost 80% of Canada’sone million Aboriginal people live in communities throughout the forested regions of the country.Their cultural survival is dependent on maintaining traditional ties with the land and wildlife, and asindustrial exploitation of our forests has moved north over the past century, First Nations have beenpushed into a corner. As well, many of the 330 single-industry communities which led the invasion ofour frontier are now in retreat and dying out as we come to the end of cheap access to high qualitynatural resources.

Setting the AgendaOf course, there has been a visible conservation effort throughout Canadian history, includingprotected areas and improved resource management practices. Our first National Park, Banff,established in 1885, draws visitors from the four corners of the globe. But, as Banff’s centennial wascelebrated in 1985, it was clear that our ad hoc approach to nature protection left it lagging far behindindustrial development and hardly qualified us as world leaders. By percentage of territory protected,Canada barely made it into the top 50 countries and the occasional pulse of regional land-use planningor site-specific protection campaigns did not seem about to change that.

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In 1987, a federal government Task Force on Park Establishmentrecommended that the Canadian national parks system be completed bythe year 2000. However, the minister responsible for national parks atthat time responded by saying this was impossible.

Up until that time there was little sense of public urgency to challenge him. But the 1980s were a timeof environmental awakening in Canada and his rejection was out of step with the public’s awakeningconcern as reflected in escalating valley-by-valley wilderness protection conflicts. Stepping into thispublic policy leadership vacuum, and building on other international recommendations as outlined inOur Common Future and Caring For the Earth, World Wildlife Fund Canada launched the EndangeredSpaces Campaign in 1989.

This science-based, advocacy campaign set a specific goal for the country: to complete a network ofprotected areas representing all of Canada’s natural regions, and totalling at least 12% of Canada’slands and waters, by the year 2000. As outlined in our campaign mission statement, the CanadianWilderness Charter, this goal was intended to galvanize a cooperative effort by Canadians to bringabout decisions by governments who still own 95% of our nation’s lands and waters. The aim was toseize a time-limited opportunity to preserve examples of all our country’s habitat types, includingforests, based on conscious foresight and deliberate planning, rather than forfeit it through continuingad hoc reactive conflicts.

Designing the CampaignHow have we designed and conducted the Endangered Spaces Campaign to achieve our goal? In broadterms, the campaign has had three dimensions.

Firstly, we have worked to gain and maintain support for the goal from all parts of Canadian society.More than 600,000 individual Canadians and 300 organizations have signed the Canadian WildernessCharter, making it one of the largest petitions in Canadian history. This includes endorsements fromorganizations as diverse as the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Indigenous Survival International(representing Aboriginal people), the Canadian Labour Congress, the United Church of Canada, theGirl Guides of Canada, and Greenpeace.

All this support resulted in unprecedented commitments from government and industry. In 1992, thefederal, territorial and provincial government ministers responsible for parks, environment and wildlifesigned “A Statement of Commitment” to completing canada’s networks of protected areas, making theyear 2000 goal their own. This commitment was subsequently echoed in the Whitehorse MiningInitiative and, most relevant to forests, Canada’s National Forest Strategy which was signed by ourforest ministers and industry associations. In 1997, the government of Canada made this a pledge tothe world by becoming one of the 22 countries committed to achieving WWF’s global Forests For Lifecampaign protected areas target.

Secondly, we have developed a consistent science-based method of measuring progress on the ground.Having set a business-like agenda, WWF also took responsibility for tracking progress and reportingannually to Canadians as a way of helping to ensure accountability. This meant that we needed anobjective way of assessing the contribution of new protected areas to achieving ecologicalrepresentation. Though the concept of representation was fairly common in professional park planningcircles when we began the campaign, there was no agreed-upon method for applying it to real-worldecological analyses and land-use decisions. In fact, we were asked by governments themselves to comeup with such a method so that we scored their action consistently. WWF therefore recruited some of thebest conservation biologists to help us meet this need, developed a coarse filter gap analysismethodology and applied it to the country. This first-ever national gap analysis became the basis for anannual report, grading each jurisdiction on its progress toward the year 2000 goal and setting actionpriorities for the coming year. These progress reports and grades maintained periodic visibility andcoherence to the otherwise widely dispersed campaign effort.

Thirdly, we have supported regional and site-specific action to identify and designate new protectedareas. In a country as large and politically decentralized as Canada, any national campaign has to

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combine top-down goals with bottom-up implementation. While the Endangered Spaces Campaign hasbeen coordinated from WWF’s national office in Toronto, its delivery was decentralized through theefforts of regional coordinators supported by WWF in every province and territory, together with asmall grants program which funded site-specific protection activity undertaken by local or regionalconservation organizations allied with the national campaign. Though, over the decade, we havedirectly identified and promoted a number of candidate reserves, we stopped short of proposing ourown comprehensive list of candidate reserves for the entire country, which could have been verydivisive. Instead, we chose to assist the efforts and evaluate the proposals of other parties engaged inlocal and regional land and resource-planning processes.

In effect, the ten-year Endangered Spaces Campaign has amounted to a kind of protected areas systemplanning process led by a conservation group rather than by government. Wherever possible, WWF hasworked in partnership with government protected areas agencies, given our common purpose andplanning methods, as well as government’s formal responsibility for protected areas decisions.Understandably, this has been an uneasy relationship at times, due to the fact that WWF has engaged inpublic advocacy, for example through the release of our annual scorecards. Easing this tensionsomewhat has been the fact that, following the 1992 ministerial commitments, WWF has been able tolegitimately claim that our efforts are simply intended to help government deliver on its own publicpolicy goal. Further, our advocacy has always been designed to be non-partisan and problem-solvingin its approach, rather than ideological and confrontational.

By setting and working to achieve a ten-year goal, WWF itself made an unprecedented commitment toplan and implement a ten-year programme. This was only possible due to our success in recruitingmajor multi-year funding commitments for our work. In fact, a handful of major donors signalled earlyin the campaign that they would stay with us for the full decade, assuring us of at least $1 million peryear in core revenue. As a result, we were able to plan our work, including pledging support to ourregional partners, with greater certainty than enjoyed by any other conservation campaign in Canada.

Measuring Progress in ProtectionThe Canadian Wilderness Charter recognizes many reasons for protecting natural areas including, butnot limited to, biodiversity conservation. In focusing the Endangered Spaces Campaign goal onrepresentation, WWF sought the most efficient, science-based strategy for serving them all, at leastminimally. While our country still offers a wide range of real-world options for locating and designingreserves to build a network, these options are rapidly disappearing in the face of human-caused habitatloss to such an extent that we can’t save everything. This approach is widely supported, for example,by the principle recommendation of the 1993 Caracas Declaration which urged that national protectedareas systems (PAS) be enlarged to safeguard the full representative range of ecosystems of eachcountry.

In WWF’s vision of a functional representative PAS, reserves are located, designed and linked togetherin a network that has the capacity to maintain the evolutionary processes critical to conservingecological systems and thereby to maintain ecological integrity. Therefore, adequate representationrequires more than the mere presence of a protected area in a natural region. Reserves must be in theright place and of the right size, shape and juxtaposition to conserve biodiversity over the long term.They must also meet certain management standards, especially permanent protection from humanactivities which have the potential to cause large-scale disruption of their natural features andprocesses. These activities include industrial development such as mining and logging as well ashydroelectric dams and oil and gas development. In other words, WWF looks beyond the formalclassification of a reserve, such as ‘national park’ or ‘wildlife area’, to determine if the actualmanagement regime is likely to yield effective conservation.Designing an ecologically representative PAS to meet these standards requires, first of all, anappropriate planning framework in the form of ecological or natural regions with which to guidereserve location and design. The scale at which regions are defined is very important. If too coarse,important pieces of our biological tapestry could be missed. If too fine, the information requirementsfor a country as large as Canada would be overwhelming and we would not account for some large-scale natural processes such as wildfire, which are important to accommodate in reserve design.Ideally, some combination of coarse and fine filter reserve planning is needed to produce the bestresults.

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For the Endangered Spaces Campaign, which adopted a coarse filter approach, a natural region isdefined as a geographic area characterized by broad similarities in landform, geology, climate andvegetation cover, mapped at scales generally ranging from 1:5,000,000 to 1:7,500,000 where regionsencompass landscape-level features such as valley systems, and boundaries often reflect fuzzytransitions such as broad physiographic and climatic gradients.

Working with the Canadian Council on Ecological Areas and other experts, includingDr Reed Noss and Dr Stan Rowe, WWF’s science team developed a GIS-based gap- analysismethodology to judge how well existing protected areas across Canada exemplify or represent thetypical ecological characteristics of these natural regions and therefore what gaps remain to be filledwith new reserves. Our methodology is based on the assumption that ecological diversity (and hencebiodiversity) is largely an expression of abiotic factors such as climate, physiography, topography andsurface geology interacting through time (Kavanagh and Iacobelli, 1995).

Once we have reviewed and refined natural regional boundaries to ensure they reflect physiographicand climatic gradients, WWF’s gap analysis then proceeds with the mapping of smaller “enduringfeatures”, the primary elements of ecological diversity, which are essentially landforms or physicalhabitats that serve as surrogates for species assemblages. For this purpose we rely on a digitalnationwide terrain database, the Soil Landscapes of Canada, developed by Agriculture and Agri-FoodCanada and mapped at scales of 1:500,000 to 1:1,000,000. Finally, we assess the relationship betweenenduring features and biodiversity based on more detailed tertiary data, where available, pertaining toecological processes and population dynamics of native species. This is typically done at a scale of1:250,000. The assessment of conservation gaps considers a number of criteria regarding ecologicalintegrity across these spatial scales: environmental gradients, important physical habitat types, sizeguidelines, connectivity/adjacency, habitat requirements for umbrella species, and habitat quality(“naturalness”) as well as the spatial scales of key ecological processes in the region. Our application ofthese criteria varies according to broad habitat types (i.e. boreal vs. prairie) and whether the enduringfeature is relatively large or small. (e.g. for boreal systems, large enduring features are greater than700,000 hectares while small enduring features are less than 35,000 hectares.)

Table 1 and Figure 1 summarize the steps and representation standards followed in the gap analysisdeveloped at WWF-Canada by Kavanagh and Iacobelli (1995). By comparing mapped enduringfeatures with existing protected area boundaries on a natural region by natural region basis, wedetermine which enduring features are not yet adequately captured by the PAS and therefore whichregions are not yet adequately represented. Map 1 displays the results of our analysis for Canada’sterrestrial natural regions, including those classified as forested.

Table 1 General spatial guidelines for assessing the ecological representation of enduringfeatures by existing protected areas.

ASSESSMENT DESCRIPTIONLittle or no representation No protected areas or no protected blocks > 200 ha.Partial representation The enduring feature has at least one protected block of habitat > 200

ha. This is large enough to address stand/patch level dynamics, such astree fall gaps.

Moderate representation The enduring feature includes protected areas of sufficient size to beginto address landscape-scale dynamics. For example, this criterion wouldbe met if protected areas are of equivalent size to the average fire size.Lands in protected areas ranging from 1,000 ha to 10,000 ha often meetthis criterion, but depend on the characteristics of the natural region.

Adequate representation The enduring feature includes protected areas of sufficient size toaddress landscape-scale dynamics and/or captures all environmentalgradients and the diversity of physical habitats. For a fire-driven forestecosystem, this may mean protected areas of the order of 500,000 ha.

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Of course, given that forest land-use planning in Canada often occursafter timber concessions have been granted, it is potentially very helpfulto be able to relate the results of a protected areas gap analysis to thesemanagement areas. In 1999, WWF conducted an analysis along these lines,resulting in the first-ever approximation of where new protected areasare still needed, or not, within each of the 354 individual forestmanagement units already established across Canada (see Map 2). This isa challenging task because the enduring feature framework used in ourgap analysis is not spatially nested within forest management units. As aresult, we simplified the analytical steps to derive an assessment of theprobability that large (e.g. >50,000 hectares), small or no new protectedareas are still needed within a specific forest management unit, based onthe relative proportion of each under-represented enduring feature itencompasses. Where the probability was low we assigned a lower estimateof protection needed. Hence, our results were reasonably conservative.Nonetheless, they appeared to hold up when checked against thefirsthand knowledge of our regional Endangered Spaces coordinators andtherefore may provide a helpful background reference for national andregional land and resource-planning processes.

Overall, a descriptive gap analysis only takes us halfway in identifying what’s needed to complete thePAS. What’s needed to effectively close the gaps is a complementary identification of sites with highconservation value which could become candidate reserves. As noted above, for strategic reasons,WWF chose not to propose candidate reserves for the entire country. However, during the latter stagesof the campaign we did develop a more prescriptive conservation values analysis for this purpose andput it to the test in the course of recent land-use planning decisions for the commercial forests ofOntario, which has a planning area of 45 million hectares.

The process consisted of analysing primary ecological themes to derive a conservation score, thenmodifying the score with additional ecological themes. In the Ontario case, WWF gained access todata enabling a region-wide analysis of intact habitat measured as the distance from the nearest road,late successional forest, wetlands and physical habitat heterogeneity. The variation within eachecological theme was scaled and ranked according to conservation value, then the scores were addedacross all themes to portray their collective variation across the region. The second step was to add orsubtract several other secondary but important landscape values from the primary theme scores. Thesemodifiers included the level of ecological representation by protected areas, the occurrence of speciesat risk, previously logged areas and the proportion of old growth red and white pine (which havedeclined throughout the province) (Iacobelli, 1999).

The resulting ‘smudge’ map displayed a seamless image of varying degrees of conservation interestacross the landscape based on the underlying themes. We were then able to use GIS techniques in aworkshop setting to identify the most highly valued areas within each natural region and designpotential core representative areas with input from other land-use planning participants regarding theirparticular interests and concerns. This was a highly successful process.

Progressing in the Real WorldAs the Endangered Spaces Campaign comes to an end, how far has Canada actually progressed on theground? What difference has our investment in conservation science actually made in terms of forestconservation results?

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Since 1989, more than 1,000 new protected areas have been designated across the country, bringing thetotal area of Canada protected to campaign standards up to 6.4%, still well short of our 12% nationalguideline. For the forested regions of Canada, the overall proportion is somewhat higher at 8.2% butstill less than the 10% target set by the WWF network through the global Forests for Life Campaign.

While important, these numbers do not tell the real story. Representation is what really counts. Asshown in Map 1, this 8.2% protection achievement, only resulted in 32 of Canada’s 388 forestednatural regions being judged to be adequately represented with protected areas as of 1999. Another 75were moderately represented, 122 were partially represented and the remaining 159 wereunrepresented, meaning they had no protected areas greater than 200 hectares. By this measure,Canada has advanced halfway at best, toward its year 2000 forest protection goal. In fact, a quick in-house WWF analysis of 35 adequately represented natural regions revealed that between 17% and 70%of the area of the natural region was required for them to attain this status. So there is certainly a longway to go and our initial 12% guideline was, as we knew, only a stepping stone to the goal ofrepresentation.

Performance has varied greatly from across Canada with jurisdictions such as Alberta, BritishColumbia, Ontario and Manitoba making significant headway, while others, including New Brunswick,Northwest Territories and Newfoundland have barely begun to do the job. No jurisdiction has fulfilledits commitment.

For those reserves we “count” toward the goal of representation, we can only generalize regarding theirmanagement effectiveness because we have little data with which to assess the actual condition andthreats facing each one. However, the fact that they enjoy long-term protection and do not allowindustrial development is a major step in the right direction. What will become increasingly importantover time is the management regime applied to the matrix within which these reserves are embedded;in other words, the stewardship of adjacent forest lands. Of course, that issue takes us into the otherrealm of WWF’s Forests For Life Campaign—forest certification.

While we can only claim partial success thus far on the ground, there is little doubt that the EndangeredSpaces Campaign, including our science-based measurement of progress, has effectively shaped theprotected areas agenda in Canada for years to come. When we began in 1989, only a handful ofjurisdictions had actually classified their natural regions. Only one or two had actually set protectedareas targets within this framework and none had committed to timetables for achieving them. Nowthey have done so. Although the forest sector has yet to adopt a standard way of measuring progress onits own protected areas commitment in the National Forest Strategy, WWF’s gap analysis is widelyaccepted as an authoritative reference (Blue Ribbon Panel, 1997) and a preliminary effort has beenmade to adapt it for application to forests (Petersen, Petersen and Pollard, 1995).

In greatly expanding our nationwide protected areas systems during the past decade, Canada has shownthat it can be a world leader in forest conservation. The question, now framed more clearly than ever, iswill we be? Will we continue to mark steady progress toward the goal of completing an ecologicallyrepresentative and effective PAS?

Learning for the futureWhat have we learned from the Endangered Spaces Campaign to guide our efforts to ensure a positiveanswer to the question above?

Fundamentally, we’ve shown that progress results from a combination of clear measurable goals,applied conservation biology and pragmatic negotiation, backed by broad public support. None ofthese alone is sufficient.

These strategies came together most effectively in the forests of Ontario during 1999 when 378 newreserves totalling 2.4 million hectares were designated with industry and government support throughthe Ontario Forest Accord. Driven by the Ontario premier’s official commitment to the EndangeredSpaces goal and favourable pre-election conditions, WWF’s gap analysis and conservation valuesanalysis played a crucial role in our successful negotiations with a market-sensitive forest industry,leading to this single largest expansion of a PAS in Canadian history.

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We cannot be certain that our coarse-filter gap analysis always led us to the best reserves in this orother real-world applications during the past decade. Additional data regarding wildlife populations,land cover and habitat condition, historical disturbance patterns (both natural and human-caused), aswell as elevation gradients and headwater areas, would undoubtedly have improved our assessmentsand will do so in future. This information also needs to be complemented with the traditional ecologicalknowledge of Aboriginal peoples wherever possible. However, the data we did have enabled us todevelop technically defensible proposals for new protected areas and to choose objectively amongvarious options when negotiating with other parties in land and resource planning.

Ultimately, our methodology and data enabled us to define a “finishable” protected areas agenda, areplicable way of confirming when representation has been achieved in a particular natural region and,ultimately, for a whole jurisdiction. This significantly increased the level of certainty about land-usedecisions, a key factor for resource industries. In short, we have been able to move from the traditionalenvironmentalist position of saying “no”, to one of saying “yes”, and thereby gain ground in the face ofrapidly declining opportunities to protect intact forests.

At the same time our “enduring features” based gap analysis should also serve us well in futureprotected areas planning for disturbed natural regions where the conservation agenda will beincreasingly focused on restoration rather than retention. This is because physical features generallysurvive in the face of human-caused habitat disturbance, including climate change, so that we willalways be able to locate reserves on a sound basis to ensure long-term protection and recovery of thefull range of potential biological conditions.

That said, the Endangered Spaces Campaign has served its purpose as a vehicle for advancing protectedareas. Our too-thin effort, intended to operate uniformly across the entire country, and focusedexclusively on core representative protected areas, needs to give way to a more flexible programmodel. We need to connect and buffer the core reserves to complete a functioning ecological networkat a bioregional scale. Local and regional ‘ownership’ of the new protected areas needs to be nourishedthrough ongoing involvement with the social and economic needs of communities. This means thatscarce conservation resources and effort need to be focused more intensely and comprehensively in afew large regions. At the same time, given the impact of globalization, especially in a trading nationsuch as Canada, this regionally focused effort needs to address and harness market forces thatpowerfully shape the destiny of local communities.

In the increasingly commercially licensed forests of Canada, the real barrier to rapid completion of thePAS is not scientific but economic. Timber harvest levels are typically set in advance of proper land-use planning, and are based instead on meeting the demand of manufacturing facilities that, in turn,support jobs and communities that are often in decline. This desperate reality reveals just how trappedwe have become in a short-term dependence on exploiting nature. Unchallenged, it leads publicdiscourse to focus on how bad things will be if we don’t continue running down our natural assetsrather than on what the costs will be if we do and how good it could be for us to change course. In theprofessional world, it leads to soothing notions of ecosystem management and proposals for “floating”nature reserves that move about the landscape whenever we need to get at the resource they are(temporarily) protecting.

Market pressure, in the form of worldwide consumer demand for forest conservation, is becoming apowerful force for change to this often politically entrenched situation, as we are currently seeing in thecoastal forests of British Columbia. There, logging companies appear ready to suspend operations for atime so that a lasting land-use solution can be fashioned. In addition, the global consolidation of theforest industry that is underway also provides opportunities for redrawing land and resource allocation.For example, over a roughly 15-year period, the area protected in a large commercial forest in Ontariogrew from 3% to 36% through successive ownership changes, where each successive company claimedthat further protection would have dire consequences for its economic viability. Nonetheless, aprofitable business is still in place there today.

While market forces are increasingly driving improved environmental performance, it remains thatgovernment, as landlord of our vast forest estate, needs to facilitate and decide on an orderly transitionby both incremental (e.g. forest licence renewal conditions) and comprehensive (e.g. regional land andresource) planning. Ultimately, the vice grip of industrial demand must be relaxed by changes ingovernment decision making so that timber harvest levels are set at the end of forest land planning as

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an output, rather than at the beginning as an input, constraining all other forest values. Whereleadership to begin addressing this issue has been demonstrated at the very centre of government, i.e.by the premier, major system-wide expansions in protected areas have occurred. Where it hasn’t,progress in designating new protected areas has been halting at best.

In future, the rights and aspirations of aboriginal people will justifiably play a much larger role in landand resource allocation and management. This reality has both positive and negative consequences forsecuring new protected areas. Many of the largest new protected areas secured during the EndangeredSpaces Campaign were driven by land claim settlements or other measures to advance the rights ofFirst Nations. On the other hand, new parks and other protected areas have also been opposed asviolating treaty rights or other entitlements like proper consultation. As the need for economic survivalgains political force within a rapidly growing aboriginal population, it is clear that conservationists andresource developers alike will need the support and partnership of First Nations to successfully advancetheir agendas. Hopefully, addressing the long-term survival of aboriginal and other rural communitieswill help bring about a more durable way of using and living in the forest.

The Endangered Spaces Campaign has been premised on the simple, heartfelt support of Canadians forprotecting our wilderness heritage. It turns out that to actually do so, and achieve the campaign goal,poses a far more fundamental challenge for our society; namely that we actually make significantchanges to the way we do business on the land. When it was endorsed as public policy for Canada in1992, the Endangered Spaces goal became far more than a WWF campaign target. In reality, it becamea practical litmus test for Canada’s global leadership on the theoretical path to the future called“sustainable development”. We have still to pass the test.

ReferencesBlue Ribbon Panel. (1997) National Forest Stategy, “Sustainable Forests: A Canadian Commitment.”Final Evaluation Report. National Forest Strategy Coalition. Ottawa, Ontario. 254pp.

Global Forest Watch Canada. (2000) Canada’s Forests at a Crossroads: An Assessment in the Year2000. A Global Forest Watch Canada Report. Victoria, British Columbia.114 pp.

Iacobelli, A. (1999) Spatial Analysis of Biodiversity Information: Summary of Efforts by WorldWildlife Fund Canada. Draft Working Document Prepared for the National Biodiversity InformationInitiative, December 1998. Revised August 1999. 13pp.

Kavanagh, K. and T. Iacobelli. (1995) A Protected Areas Gap Analysis Methodology: Planning for theConservation of Biodiversity. World Wildlife Fund Canada Discussion Paper. Toronto, Ontario. 68pp.

Noss, R. (1995) Maintaining Ecological Integrity in Representative Networks. World Wildlife FundCanada/World Wildlife Fund United States Discussion Paper. Toronto, Ontario. 77pp.

Petersen, E.B., N.M. Petersen and D.F.W. Pollard. (1995) Some principles and criteria to makeCanada’s protected areas systems representative of the nation’s forest diversity. For. Chron. 71:497-507.

The State of Canada’s Forests: the people’s forests 1997-1998. (1998) NRCan, CFS, HQ, Policy,Planning and International Affairs Branch, Ottawa, Ontario. Annu. Rep. 108pp.

WWF (1999) Canada’s Commitment to Forest Protected Areas: A WWF status report. A WWF Forestsfor Life Campaign Report. Godalming, Surrey. 17pp.

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Protected Area System Planning in Lao P.D.R.

Klaus Berkmuller

AbstractA systematic survey of candidate areas for a national protected area system began in1989 and ended in 1995. Proposals resulting from the surveys led to the declaration of18 National Biodiversity Conservation Areas, raising national level protected areacoverage from nil to 12 per cent.

The selection of areas was based on considerations of vegetation cover and condition,land use and presence of key wildlife species. Coverage was assessed for contributionto biogeographic sub-unit, major forest type, and altitude zones. The relativeimportance of individual areas was linked to the level of respective coverageachieved.

The plan served to place protected areas into the policy arena and ittriggered a healthy debate of hydropower issues, but its effectiveness inguiding post-declaration management was limited.

Klaus BerkmullerIUCN, S & SE Asia Regional OfficeP.O. Box 4Klong LuangPathumthani 12120THAILANDemail: klausb@loxinfo.co.th

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Protected Area System Planning in Lao P.D.R.

Klaus Berkmuller

IntroductionThe Indochina conflict brought political and social upheaval also to Laos, nowofficially known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao P.D.R.). The yearsfollowing the revolution of 1975 saw the establishment of a socialist economyfinanced partly by logging. However, economic development was slow and, in 1986,the Fourth Party Congress adopted the ‘New Economic Mechanism’ allowing privateownership and encouraging foreign investment. Efforts to introduce forestconservation coincided with accelerated economic growth at a rate of 6-7% perannum through the early and mid-nineties until the regional downturn in 1997.Hydropower development for sale of electricity to neighbouring countries was acentral part of development planning by government but was not coordinated withforest conservation.

In 1988, the ‘Lao-Swedish Forestry Cooperation Program’, previously supportingmainly forest inventory and management focused on timber production, added a‘Forest Conservation Sub-Program’ (FCP) in order to ‘evaluate on a broad scale thestatus and distribution of forest and wildlife resources in the Lao P.D.R., and todetermine priority conservation needs’ (SIDA,1988).

The FCP began by reviewing the information available for areas that had beensuggested as deserving protected area status. Among these were 23 national forestreserves dating back to as early as 1937. Little documentation was available and therewere no records of any area having any form of conservation management. In May1989, FCP presented its approach (Salter and Phanthavong, 1989).

The ApproachThe aim was to evaluate the options for ensuring proportionalrepresentation of the major forest types and altitude zoneswithin the Lao portion of each relevant biogeographic sub-unit of the Indochinese subregion of the Indo-Malayan Realm.A target of between 5% and 20% of the original extent ofeach forest type in each sub-unit was considered feasible. Thedelineation of sub-units and distribution and area of originalforest types was taken from the Review of the protected areassystem of the Indo-Malayan Realm (MacKinnon andMacKinnon, 1986). The sub-units in question comprisedCentral Indochina tropical lowland plains (10a), NorthernIndochina hilly, sub-tropical sector (10b), and the AnnamTrung Son mountain chain (5b).

The importance of wetlands was recognized but the investigationsconcentrated on large forest areas. It was assumed that, to aconsiderable extent, wetlands would be included by default.The review began with a desk assessment and was followed by field surveys. For eachcandidate area, current land use and vegetation cover, and altitude classes weredetermined from available maps. The assessment of land use and vegetation cover

Fig. 1: Biogeographicsub-units relevant for Laos

5 b10 b

10 a

10 a

5 b

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initially had to rely on the information contained in a 1:1,000,000 scale land-use mapcurrent to 1981. After completion of a National Forest Inventory in 1992 (Manivongand Sandewall, 1992), the forest type coverage assessment followed. The number ofcover classes was reduced to five (dry evergreen, mixed deciduous, dry dipterocarp,coniferous and mixed coniferous/broadleaf forest, and other natural cover). Land-usemaps at scale 1:50,000 based on interpretation of SPOT satellite imagery dated 1989to 1991 allowed a more up-to-date evaluation of land use, forest cover, and forestcondition in terms of density and stem size.

Field surveys provided additional information from both direct observations anddiscussions with local people and officials on:

• options and ease of access

• presence of enclave villages

• current and/or past logging

• forest condition along the travelled routes

• approximate location of mature forest away from the travelled routes

• approximate location of preferred areas for hunting

• presence or absence of key-wildlife species

• livestock predation by large predators

• types of current land use

• approximation of boundaries, likely extensions, new areas.

Based on a semi-objective assessment of the information gathered, a decision wasmade as to whether the area in question deserved to be proposed for national protectedarea status. Areas were rejected because of deficiencies in habitat condition(minimum of 75% classified as natural cover type) and/or size (minimum 500km2).The status of system planning was published in three reports (Salter and Phanthavong,1991; Berkmuller et al., 1993; Berkmuller et al., 1995).

All Lao protected areas are best classified as resource reserves or multiple usemanagement areas. in order to emphasize their potential as future national parks ornature reserves and to set them apart from ordinary conservation forest, they werecalled National Biodiversity Conservation Areas (NBCA) in the English languagereport and translated into Lao as ‘National Forest Reserve’.

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Results

Recommended areasProtected areas wererecommended in batchesstarting in 1991. By mid-1995 the ForestConservation Sub-program had proposed 28areas covering 35,370km2 for NationalBiodiversityConservation Area status(Berkmuller et al., 1995).

More than half of theoriginal candidate areashad been rejectedbecause they were founddeficient in habitatcondition or size.

For the 17 originalcandidate areas thathad been accepted,boundaries weredifferent from thosesuggested at the

beginning of the review.During the investigations additional areas came under consideration. Eleven newareas were eventually recommended for NBCA status in the 1995 status report.Several locations remained under consideration. Among them, Dong Khanthung wasfound to have outstanding wildlife conservation value and was recommended in 1998(Round, 1998).

Sorting the wheat from the chaff, even at this broad level, provided thebasis for subsequent area declaration.

Area declarationThe first areas were declared at prime minister level inOctober 1993. They included all 17 areas recommendedin the 1993 status report. Of the eleven additional areasrecommended in 1995 (Berkmuller et al., 1995) onlyone, Xe Sap, has since been declared. In many casesthere were discrepancies between the recommended andthe declared extent of the area. On average, the declaredsize is larger than 150 km2.

Fig.3: Declared areas

still under consideration

Areas under consideration in 1989

ss

s

Areas recommended in 1995(includes declared and undeclared areas)

s

s

declaredNational BiodiversityConservation Areas

Fig. 2: Areas under considerationand areas recommended

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Two areas were declared that had not been recommended under the review. One(Phou Phanang) was declared for its political and historical value. The other (DongPhou Vieng) was elevated from provincial forest reserve to NBCA status to satisfy atarget site requirement for the World Bank/GEF conservation component of the ForestManagement and Conservation Project (FOMACOP).

Coverage by biogeographic sub-unit and altitudeTotal area coverage for the country in declared NBCAs and within recommendedboundaries now stands at 12%. Coverage for the lowland plains (10a) is 14.1% andcould still increase. The Annamites (5b) are represented at 22.4% with the possibilityof further increases. For the northern highlands (10b) coverage will remain below10% even when including the newly recommended areas. Coverage increases areprobably still feasible if areas smaller than 500 km2 were considered.

All altitude categories are represented including low altitudes (< 200 m). Coverage isdeemed adequate except for the very high altitude category (> 2,000 m) in sub-unit10a.

Table 1: Coverage* by biogeographic sub-unit

subunitno. of

NBCAsarea in Lao

portion of thesub-unit (km²)

area withindeclaredreserves

(km²)10a (Central Indochina, tropical lowland plains) 10** 113,365 15,951 14.1%10b (Northern Indochina, hilly sub-tropical sector) 4 85,668 5,135 6.0%5b (Annam Trung Son mountain chain) 5 34,089 7,628 22.4%whole country 19 236,800 28,714 12.1%

* Within declared areas and recommended boundaries** Phou Phanang excludedSub-unit figures do not add up to country total because 3,678 km2 of the marginal sub-unit 10c are not shown.

Coverage by forest typeCoverage of forest types was evaluated relative to original area andcurrent area (Table 2). While original coverage adds a historicalperspective, current coverage is more relevant for assessing the practicaloptions. A historic decline of evergreen forest types seems evident fromthe data. The data also suggest that all remaining evergreen forest isalready contained in declared reserves, yet additional evergreen forest isknown to exist in as yet undeclared reserves. The National Office ofForest Inventory and Planning (NOFIP) report did acknowledge that dryevergreen forest was underestimated during photo interpretation whichwould explain at least some of the apparent increase in mixed deciduousforest types. An increase in deciduous forest types may also be due tofire and cutting causing a gradual transformation of former evergreenforest. It seems clear, however, that almost a quarter of the currentclosed forest is contained in declared protected areas.Coniferous forest types seem comparatively well represented at 15% of the originalarea. Dry dipterocarp forest is represented at about 7% and 10% of original andcurrent area respectively.

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Table 2: Percentage of original and current area under different forest typespercent of Lao PDR land area

NOFIPClassification equivalent in MacKinnon

original*

NOFIP1992**

declaredNBCAs

upper dry evergreen (UDE)lower dry evergreen (LDE)

tropical montane evergreen (TME)sub-montane dry evergreen (SMDE)lowland semi-evergreen (SER)

68% 4.8% 4.8%

upper mixed deciduous (UMD)lower mixed deciduous (LMD)

tropical montane deciduous (TMD)forest on limestone (FL)sub-tropical montane (SMF)

23% 35.1% 4.1%

coniferous, mixedconiferous/broadleaf (S, MS)

pine forest (TPF) 2.0% 1.7% 0.3%

dry dipterocarp (DD) dry dipterocarp (DDF) 7.0% 5.1% 0.5%sources: * original forest cover figures taken from Salter and Phanthavong (1989) based on MacKinnon and MacKinnon (1986)** adapted from tables 5.3, 9.7 in Manivong and Sandewall 1992, National Office of Forest Inventory and Planning (NOFIP)note: Forest on limestone is probably also contained within NOFIP classification of rock (R) and heath, stunted, and scrub forest(SR).

The national inventory did not contain data on forest cover by biogeographic sub-unit.Coverage could only be estimated relative to original forest type coverage (Table 3).Of immediate concern is the total absence of coniferous forest types in the northernhighlands and low coverage of evergreen forest.

Table 3: Coverage* by forest type and biogeographic sub-unitpercent of original area of forest

types contained in declared NBCAssub-unit E MD DD C/BC

10a (Central Indochina, tropical lowland plains)** 7.5% 31.5% 7.0% n.a.10b (Northern Indochina, hilly sub-tropical sector) 1.8% 10.9% n.a. 0%5b (Annam Trung Son mountain chain) 16.3% 30.2% n.a. 10.1%*within declared areas and recommended boundaries** Phou Phanang excluded

E = dry (semi-) evergreenMD= mixed deciduousDD=dry dipterocarpC/BC=coniferous and mixed broadleaf/coniferous

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Contribution of individual reserves to dense and mature forest coverAreas vary greatly in their contribution to extent and quality of forestcover (Table 4). Under the assumption that undisturbed forest generallyhas a higher conservation value than disturbed forest it makes sense toevaluate areas according to the extent of undisturbed forest theycontain. For evergreen and mixed deciduous forest types, the degree ofdisturbance can be inferred from crown density and maturity.Undisturbed forest was taken to largely coincide with NOFIP densityclass 3 (> 70% crown cover) and stand structure classes 3 (40-60 cm dbh)or 4 (>60cm dbh). In the great majority of NBCAs, dry evergreen forestor mixed deciduous forest types are dominant. A low percentage (<50%)of reserve area in density class 3 is usually associated with shiftingcultivation and/or logging. At least seven of the declared reserves fall inthis group.Dry dipterocarp forest does not occur in density class 3. Similarly, karstareas or areas with extensive natural grasslands, wetlands, and rockyflats are not expected to have extensive tracts of dense forest andrequire different considerations.

Table 4: Dense and mature forest in declared areasArea name dense and mature forest

area(km2)

all forest(km2)

total(km2)

fraction of allforest in p.a.

fraction ofp.a. area

Nakai Nam Theun 3,710 3,450 2,739 0.79 0.74Xe Pian** 2,665 2,478 1,248 0.50 0.47Xe Sap 1,498 1,177 1,125 0.96 0.75Nam Kading 1,740 1,479 1,033 0.70 0.59Phou Dene Dinh 1,310 1,166 1,014 0.87 0.77Dong Phou Vieng 2,201 1,189 844 0.71 0.38Dong Ampham 1,975 1,827 707 0.39 0.36Phou Loeuy 1,465 1,275 668 0.52 0.46Xe Bang Nouan** 1,260 1,096 645 0.59 0.51Phou Xiang Thong 995 746 639 0.86 0.64Dong Hua Sao 910 837 466 0.56 0.51Nam Poui 1,150 1,070 458 0.43 0.40Phou Khao Khoay 1,390 1,223 446 0.36 0.32Nam Ha (East) 445 441 426 0.97 0.96Phou Xang He 1,060 975 386 0.40 0.36Nam Et 1,915 1,379 187 0.14 0.10Nam Xam 580 493 180 0.37 0.31Hin Namno* 865 268 174 0.65 0.20Khammouan Lime.* 1,580 253 93 0.37 0.06

Total/mean 28,714 22,822 13,478 0.59 0.47source: NOFIP land use maps, density class 3 and stand structure classes 3/4;* karst areas where closed forest is not expected** areas with over 20% of dry dipterocarp forest

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Countrywide, NOFIP estimates a total of 21,989km2 in density class 3 and standstructure classes 3 and 4. Sixty-one per cent are contained in declared protected areas(Table 5). A further 20 per cent are contained in recommended protected areas.

Table 5: Area of dense and mature forest* indeclared and proposed NBCAs by biogeographic sub-unit

biogeogr.sub-unit

(km²) % of country total

sub-unit 10adeclared NBCAs

6,611 30.1%

recommendedNBCAs 1,630 7.4%

sub-unit 10bdeclared NBCAs

2,295 10.4%

recommendedNBCAs 1,589 7.2%

sub-unit 5bdeclared NBCAs

4,570 20.8%

recommendedNBCAs 1,092 5.0%

declared NBCAs13,476 61.3%

COUNTRY recommendedNBCAs 4,311 19.6%

national inventory 21,989** 100%* as defined in Table 4**compiled from Manivong and Sandewall (1992), appendix 2.44., 2.45., 2.46.

Repercussions of hydropower development

Among the policy issues noted in the 1995 status report, road construction andhydropower development were singled out as among the most amenable to directgovernment action. Serious impact from the latter was anticipated for five declaredprotected areas and four recommended areas (Berkmuller, 1995). While NBCA statusof affected areas has not caused any hydropower project to be abandoned, itcompelled government and other project proponents to acknowledge conservationconcerns in a semi-public forum probably for the first time in Laos. Much of thedebate revolved around Nakai-Nam Theun which had topped every ranking andanalysis of conservation value. Nakai-Nam Theun also had one of the most favourablecost-benefit ratios among 60 hydropower sites. The Lao Government and projectproponents were motivated to engage in discussions by their desire to obtain loanguarantees from the World Bank (WB). The World Conservation Union (IUCN)joined the planning on the understanding that there would be substantial benefits forconservation e.g. the commitment of money from hydropower sales for the long termmanagement and the approval of any extension proposals that might emerge from theEIA process as mitigation measure. ‘As a result of WB & IUCN involvement, Nakai-Nam Theun/Nam Theun 2 (NNT/NT2) has received the most comprehensiveenvironmental & social assessments, and strategic management planning of any ofthe dam-NBCA linkages’ (Chape, 1999).

In a roundabout way hydropower had a strong influence on the declarationof protected areas and their selection for management. Nakai-Nam Theunand Dong Ampham were among the four target sites where the GEFfunded component of the Forest Management and Conservation Project(FOMACOP) would support management, yet both areas had planned

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hydropower projects. Understandably, The World Bank did not wish to beseen using GEF money to support watershed management benefitinghydropower projects, and requested that alternative sites be assigned.The proposed NBCA Xe Sap was the only other option in the FOMACOPproject area and was henceforth declared. The 530 km2 provincialreserved forest Dong Phou Vieng was elevated to NBCA status within twoweeks without any credentials attesting to its biological importance.When later surveys found the most valuable forest and wildlife resourcesto be located outside it was enlarged to almost 2,000km2.

How much biodiversity is contained in the system?McNeely (1996) has summarized the approaches to setting conservationpriorities as ecosystem-based or species-based. Critical issues noted byMcNeely clearly applied to the Lao assessment, namely the bias inherentin the approach and uncertainties regarding comprehensiveness andquality of the data used. The Lao experience also illustrates the need tohave ‘a combination of different approaches, emphasizing differentaspects of biodiversity’.The ultimate purpose of making the broad evaluation of wildlandresources was to provide the Lao government with a list of potentialprotected areas that are likely to capture most, if not all, of thecountry’s biodiversity. Judging protected area importance on the basis ofclosed forest cover and condition would be misleading if it alone was usedto prioritize area declaration and management. Dong Khanthung, with itsopen forests and wetlands, would rank low regardless of its uniqueassemblage of key species, including the only resident population of Eld’sdeer known to still exist in the country. Dong Phou Vieng was missed bythe review. Yet, it still commands an impressive array of sizeablepopulations of large mammal key species.Much new information was generated by wildlife inventories supported bythe Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). More complex and species-based analysis is now possible allowing a more holistic view of biodiversity.WCS (Ling, 1999) carried out ordination and complementary analysis ofLao NBCAs on the basis of bird species occurrence. Ordination was usedto determine the degree of similarity of their avifauna and relate it tofactors that may correlate with different faunal characteristics.Biogeographic sub-unit was determined as one of the most influentialfactors. Complementary analysis was used to determine the set of areasneeded to achieve a specific goal, e.g. inclusion of all species in at leasttwo areas. From this, Ling concluded that none of the NBCAs are totallyreplaceable but also that ‘a substantial proportion of Lao biodiversity is

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not contained within the NBCA system’, e.g. that ‘116 of 684 bird species,including 47 of 143 key species have not been confirmed in any NBCA’.The missing species are largely those typical of wetlands and openhabitats.The perceived priority of an area differs depending on the type of assessment used. Inthe end, not all the decision-making criteria are readily measured and ranked. Nor,indeed, are political decisions based on biodiversity merits alone. Distribution bybiogegraphic sub-unit and broad habitat parameters, such as altitude and forest type,seems appropriate for identifying options and gaps in situations where information isscant and uneven. Once the options and major gaps are known, system planning canmove into a new phase, the closing of gaps and the reordering of priorities in the lightof new information.

Conclusions and recommendations

Without a systematic review of candidate areas it was not possible tomake a rational choice of protected areas at the time. Therecommendations reflected what was known then and now need to beadjusted to current levels of knowledge. More effort will have to go into‘selling’ protected areas to politicians and donors alike.Despite the impressive achievements in terms of land area nominallybrought under protection, conservation stands on weak legs in Laos.Logging was resumed on a large scale in 1999, even in natural forestcontrary to stated government policy. There is evidence of unabashed andlarge-scale logging in at least one declared NBCA and more still fromproposed protected areas. The latter seem to have been purged fromofficial maps.The window for declaring further protected areas seems to have closedfor the time being. If proposed NBCAs are declared at all, it will probablybe case by case and in response to opportunities as with Xe Sap and DongPhou Vieng. In order to maximize conservation gain by additions,priorities should be assigned and qualified in readiness for when suchchances arise. It will be especially important to build a strong case andlobby for Dong Khanthung because it is exceptional in many respects.Duckworth et al. (1999) emphasize the need to reset priorities in a formalway to justify the reallocation of resources if necessary. They furthersuggest intensifying the search for specific wildlife resources, habitatcombinations, or habitat types that are in short supply, yet crucial forthe survival of key species.Management is rudimentary and relies largely on external funding. Eightdonor agencies have been involved and a corresponding variety ofmanagement approaches have been tried out, but not independentlycompared and evaluated. To avoid overlap and conflict, the Laogovernment assigned different parts of the country to different donors.

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Coordination at a central level is considered a key need (Marsh andSouthammakhot, 1999). Conservation priority was not a decisiveconsideration in the selection of areas for management.Even if Lao protected areas eventually attain National Park status,significant portions will remain as ‘controlled use zones’ open toextractive use. The value of resources obtained from protected areas issurprisingly high in many areas, yet not fully recognized. If adequatelyquantified it could become a plausible argument for the declaration ofadditional protected areas.Considerable boundary revisions relative to declared boundaries seem unavoidable.The necessity of some substantial excisions provides an argument for extending inother areas or declaring proposed reserves to substitute for the loss.

Investigations now need to identify areas necessary for the survival of species notrecorded from any of the existing NBCAs. Much of this work is likely to focus onwetland sites. The adequacy of declared areas to sustain viable populations of selectedkey species, notably elephants, should be examined as it may provide convincingarguments for forming larger contiguous protected area complexes.

Donor involvement varies widely in terms of philosophy, time horizons,levels of funding, degree of control, and reporting requirements. It isnecessary now to capitalize on the experiences gained and agree onguidelines for funding, staffing, facilities and approaches that areappropriate for Laos. An evaluation of donor inputs and approaches shouldbe an essential step before committing more money and human resources.Donors should use whatever leverage they may have to argue for thedeclaration of high priority areas, most notably the Nakai Nam Theunextension and Dong Khanthung.Institutional capacity is low in all sectors including forestry andprotected area management. Outside funding is essential but must beprovided at the right dosage. While large funding does indeed bring manybenefits (infrastructure, equipment, training) it can, at the same time, beself-defeating if the local capacity is so low that it cannot dealadequately with the management and application requirements of projectswith large-scale funding (Chape 1999).Conservation Units within the provincial forestry sections should be thenodal agency for projects with focus on field management. Yet, they tendto be side-lined and dwarfed by the projects. To alleviate this problem,projects should earmark a percentage of their budget for support to theConservation Unit. They should strive to standardize reporting andmonitoring procedures and deliberately involve the Unit in theirimplementation.

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The author acknowledges valuable comments and suggestions by Stuart Chape, GordonClaridge and Stephen Ling.

References

Berkmüller K, Phanthavong B, and Vongphet V (1993). Protected Area SystemPlanning and Management in Lao PDR. Status Report to mid-1993. Lao SwedishForestry Cooperation Program (IUCN), Vientiane.

Berkmüller K (1995). Hydropower Development and Protected Areas (ProblemAnalysis). Unpublished briefing paper for Lao government. Lao Swedish ForestryCooperation Program (IUCN), Vientiane.

Berkmüller K, Southammakhot S, and Vongphet V (1995). Protected Area SystemPlanning and Management in Lao PDR. Status Report to mid-1995. Lao SwedishForestry Cooperation Program (IUCN), Vientiane.

Chape S (1999). Issues in Biodiversity Conservation in Lao PDR. Compiled for theAsian Development Bank, IUCN Country Office, Lao PDR

Duckworth J W, Salter R E, and Khounboline K (compilers) (1999). Wildlife in LaoPDR: 1999 Status Report. Vientiane: The World Conservation Union (IUCN) /Wildlife Conservation Society / Centre for Protected Areas and WatershedManagement.

Ling S (1999). A biological system of prioritization for protected areas in the LaoPDR. Unpublished manuscript, Wildlife Conservation Society, Vientiane.

MacKinnon J, and MacKinnon K (1986). Review of the protected areas system of theIndo-Malayan realm. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge U.K.

Manivong K, and Sandewall M (1992). Forest cover and land use in Lao P.D.R.: finalreport on the nationwide reconnaissance survey. National Office of Forest Inventoryand Planning (NOFIP), Lao Swedish Forestry Cooperation Program, Vientiane.

Marsh C, and Southammakhot S (1999). The Protected Area System in Lao PDR:Country Status Report – 1999. Paper presented at the Second Regional Forum forSoutheast Asia of the IUCN World Commission for Protected Areas, Department ofForestry, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Vientiane, Lao PDR.

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McNeely J (1996). Assessing Methods for Setting Conservation Priorities. Paperpresented to the OECD Conference on Biodiversity, Cairns. IUCN, Gland,Switzerland.

Round P (1998). Wildlife Survey in Dong Khanthung. Report to the project‘Integrating Conservation and Development in Dong Khanthung.Wildlife Conservation Society, Vientiane.

Salter R E, and Phanthavong B, (1989). Needs and priorities for a protected areasystem in Lao PDR. Lao Swedish Forestry Cooperation Program (IUCN), Vientiane.

Salter R E, Phanthavong B, and Venevongphet (1991). Planning and development of aprotected area system in Lao PDR: status report to mid-1991, Lao Swedish ForestryCooperation Program (IUCN), Vientiane.

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Integrating Forest Protected Areas within National DevelopmentStrategies

Thomas McShane 5 and Gonzalo Oviedo6

Protected area development has become one of the more visible and contentious areasof contact between local communities and protected area managers, internationalconservation organizations and development agencies. The methods conservationistshave often used, such as establishing parks and putting armed rangers in the field --the basic elements of an approach called "preservationism" -- date from an earlier era.However, this can no longer stand alone. Despite the accomplishments, as long asconservation operates on the notion that saving the environment means separatingpeople from nature, it will become less and less relevant to civil society. Parks andother protected areas will eventually be overrun by people's need for land unless theparks serve, or are at least not completely inimical to, the needs of local communities.

The methods of developing protected area systems have changed little over the lastcentury. The process has almost always involved the expensive operation of removingthose people living on the newly protected land, and/or setting up sophisticated, rigid,and authoritarian control and patrolling systems to prevent people from entering thearea or using its resources. The result is a park surrounded by people who wereexcluded from the planning of the area, do not understand its purpose, derive little orno benefit from the money poured into its creation, and hence do not support itsexistence. Moreover, in many cases local communities have had no alternative otherthan settling on degraded or marginal surrounding lands, with the inevitableconsequences of aggravating poverty and further environmental degradation. As aresult, local communities develop lasting distrust of park authorities, in part becauseof the glaring lack of attention those authorities, supported by conservationists, havetraditionally paid to the link between protected areas and the livelihood of displacedpeople.

For protected area systems to be truly successful, problems cannot be approachedsimply through field implementation. Decisions and policies at the national and/orinternational level impact actions at the local level, and vice-versa. Many of theshort-comings in today's protected area management are based on beliefs that what isbeing done is simply on-the-ground protection when, in fact, it is really undertakinglarge-scale social interventions in complicated macropolitical settings.

For developing countries in particular, fighting poverty is a fundamentalobjective, and as populations grow and economies face crises, competitionfor land and resources increases. It is difficult nowadays to think ofsuccessful protected area systems that do not contribute or ignore thesepriority development objectives. This is particularly true in the case of 5 Thomas McShane, Coordinator, DGIS-WWF Tropical Forest Portfolio, WWF International,email:tmcshane@wwfint.org

6 Gonzalo Oviedo, Head, People & Conservation Unit, WWF International, email:goviedo@wwfint.org

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forests, which have been traditionally providers of goods and services tolocal people, and which are recognized to be important economic assetsand opportunities that could well contribute to alleviating poverty ifsustainably utilized. Global processes are likely to create moreproblematic situations over the next few decades. The world communityis beginning to acknowledge that unequal benefits to societies contributesto deepening economic crises. Development objectives, in particularmeeting the needs of the poorest, will therefore become even morecompelling, and may well displace environmental protection at a lowerpriority level. In this context, is it possible to design and implementprotected areas, individually or as systems or networks, that aresustainable and receive the necessary political support if they are notseen as contributing to development objectives? What are the conditionsthat protected areas will have to meet for that purpose? Conservationorganizations advocate for the expansion of protected area systems tocover at least an additional three per cent of the land surface, at theexpense of land and resources that could be otherwise used for economicand development objectives. Is this really feasible, or is it just animposition from conservation élites that are insensitive to developmentneeds and priorities?

The following are some of the issues considered critical to effective Protected AreasSystems in the context of national development plans and strategies:

• Integration of Protected Area Systems in the national economy/nationaldevelopment strategy and/or with development objectives

• Land-use and Protected Area Systems

• Legal and institutional issues surrounding the setting up of Protected AreaSystems

• Process aspects for setting up a National Protected Area System.

Attempting to tackle these issues may take the form of a "vertically integrated" mix ofactions. Linkages will likely need to be identified and established between nationaldevelopment objectives and plans and protected area systems before setting out toimplement field actions or affect policy change. Approaches might try to addressissues simultaneously at all levels with direct participation from local and nationalcommunities (i.e. field programmes demonstrating what works and what does not;policy initiatives influencing and changing factors across broad constituencies; andcampaigns encouraging action to achieve change). Lessons derived at local, nationaland international levels may then be used to adapt approaches so that the ability torespond to both development and conservation priorities remains flexible and creative.

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The challenge is then to identify and address these and other factorsthat can ensure that protected area initiatives, that have traditionallybeen limited to field-based and sometimes socially insensitive actions,become effective and sustainable in the long-term. Conservation cannotignore the needs of human beings, while development that runs roughshodover the environment is doomed. Protected area development must takeinto account the problems of rural societies who live day to day next tothese areas, or they will disappear.

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Is it Always Right to Kill the Goose?or IUCN Categories V and VI vs. Community-Based Resource Management

Antoine Leclerc and Baptiste Noël Randrianandianina1

AbstractThis paper asks: “Should we have created all these protected areas in thefirst place, and should we create more?” If so many parks remain paperparks or are poorly managed, is this a management problem only, or is itthat in many cases protected areas are not the effective tools that wefigured them to be. Parks are usually presented as both a means forconservation of biodiversity and of stimulating local/regionaldevelopment. We know that too often, neither of these goals is attainedconclusively, at least not at a level that can compensate for theinconvenience, and sometimes hardship imposed on local communities.

To address these broad issues, we need to ask the following specific questions:

• Is a poorly preserved forest protected area better than a community-managed source of energy,earnings, pride, and building material?

• Are we certain that an area had to become a protected area? (quality of science?) Are we reallycomfortable that preserving nature in that area is preferable to a desirable rate of "normal"growth in the community, that might not be so detrimental to biological diversity after all?

• Is "ecotourism" development a valid motor for socio-economic growth?• Would international funds have been better spent on more focused regional development,

agriculture, or on building roads for traditional products to reach the market?

(ANGAP stands for Association Nationale pour la gestion des Aires Protégées, the organizationresponsible for managing the national protected areas in Madagascar)

Antoine Leclerc Senior Technical Advisor, ANGAP c/o Madagascar Programme OfficeP.O. Box 738Antananarivo 101

MADAGASCARemail: aleclerc@online.mg

1Baptiste Noël RandrianandianinaANGAPemail:angap@bow.dts.mg

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Is it Always Right to Kill the Goose?or IUCN Categories V and VI vs. Community-Based Resource Management

Antoine Leclerc and Baptiste Noël Randrianandianina

Managing protected areas is a fascinating and rewarding occupation. It is also a complex, expensive,and frustrating endeavour. In recent years, systematic evaluations have shown that we are not alwaysas effective as we would have wished to be, and certainly not as successful as some of the populationswe affect have been led to believe we would. In fact, just two years before the 2002 Vth WorldCongress on Protected Areas, recent literature and preparatory material for the present Congresssuggest that parks are in crisis, both in terms of conservation effectiveness and socio-culturallegitimacy.

This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the organizers for the Beyond the Trees conference havewritten, on the front page of the invitation leaflet: "The historical view of protected areas as islands insociety set aside to conserve biological diversity is now considered an outdated concept."

This quote, which reflects Ervin H. Zube's presentation, "No Park Is an Island" (Zube, 1995), at theIVth World Congress on Parks and Protected Areas in Venezuela, suggests that, for one thing, theenvironmental concepts of "minimal risk factor", and of "minimal impact", which have long beenconsidered insurance policies for nature protection, may have been poorly applied. Unquestionably,reduced use of the environment means less potential damage, and harbouring nature within fences, realor virtual, could help prevent degradation. However, this tends at times to sound like the oldmanagement saying: those who do nothing make no mistakes…and achieve little.

We, the co-authors of this paper, who work in one of the least developed countries in the world, feelthat these "insurance policies" are too often applied as a one-way street. They appear to considernature only. What about risks to man's welfare, in and around parks? Is it always warranted to "kill thegoose" that would keep laying precious eggs, year after year, for deprived local communities?Sometime in 1999, a Canadian television program about conservation issues pertaining to thedevelopment of a mixed forest/wetland area in North America, concluded with this question: Are wesure that enough consideration has been given to the potential impact, on the environment, ofdeveloping this area? The question is legitimate. Even more so, in our judgement, if it had beenaccompanied by the reciprocal: Are we sure that enough consideration has been given to the potentialimpact, on the people, of not developing this area?

All in all, are we always spending our energies and money wisely, both for the sake of conservation,and for the sake of the populations we affect? Davis Mwamfupe has written, about protected areas inTanzania: "It has become increasingly clear that local people lack commitment to participation inconservation matters. Where there is sabotage it is because they have been alienated, and do notbenefit in any way from these protected areas." (Mwamfupe, 1998). Unfortunately, many of us arefamiliar with such hard words.

Voluminous literature has been produced in the last decade about the conflicts between parks andpeople. We cannot turn our back on, nor disown, such situations. There is growing recognition that themanagement of protected areas, and to a degree the concept itself -- or at least the way it is perceivedand applied at times, are in question.

There are, indeed, increasingly strong incentives for an in-depth review of the way we "do business", inmany respects. On 15 March 2000 Kathryn Fuller, President of WWF-US and James Wolfensohn,President of the World Bank, wrote in New Jersey's Bergen Record that “the WWF-World Bank ForestAlliance has added a new target of transforming 125 million acres of existing parks into effectivelymanaged protected areas.” (Fuller and Wolfenson, 2000) They were underscoring the problem of"paper parks" - areas that legally have been declared protected, but for which there has been little or nocommitment of resources to make the protection a reality.

How many of these acres could have been put to less controversial use, under some other status thatleans more towards sustainable development, and towards people, than towards conservation andpotential aggravation? Food for thought? Indeed, 125 million acres of it.

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In Madagascar, a recent unpublished evaluation by those who should be the beneficiaries of theNational Environmental Action Plan (NEAP) apparently shows a disturbingly low level of satisfaction(private communication, Office National de l'Environnement (ONE), Madagascar 1999). Yet, we aredealing with a country where no significant environmental organization ever speaks about conservationwithout mentioning people and development also in the same breath. As a matter of fact, thisconnection is at the core of the NEAP. It is perceived by us and by our colleagues as inseparable fortwo reasons:

• fighting poverty will hopefully contribute to nature preservation by making people less dependenton the indiscriminate abuse of nature

• there can be no sustainable use of natural resources without extensive community involvement.

In October, the IUCN Global Biodiversity Forum no. 15, will face the challenge of addressing the firstof these themes. For our part, we will focus on key aspects of the second one, starting with thefollowing consideration:

When recognizing the unquestionable benefits for civilization, in the long term, of preservingbiological diversity in situ, as outlined in Section 8 of the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity:

• Do we assume too readily that PAs constitute the best solution in too many cases, morespecifically when considering the creation of PAs outside IUCN Categories I, II and III?

• Are we always careful and thorough enough in analysing the information, the context, and thealternatives, before promoting and at times virtually imposing the creation of a new PA that willhave an impact on people?

• In other words, are we comfortable with the potential damage done to local communities bycreating a park that may well end up not being a valid instrument for conservation anyway, whilemoney and energy spent on other approaches to the sustainable management of resources mayprove much more productive.

We are fully aware that in feeding this debate, we may be perceived as welcoming the anti-parkargument referred to by the Chair of WCPA, Prof. Adrian Phillips, in his most recent "Message fromthe Chair" (Phillips, 1999). Have no fear; we do not "want to do away with parks altogether, or at leastsharply reduce the number of areas under protection", as Prof. Phillips mentions. How could we everdisagree with him that "the values of protected areas need to be restated time and again"? InMadagascar, where the level of endemism for an amazing biodiversity reaches a striking 80 per cent onaverage, for both the fauna and the flora, the PAs that we manage are conservatories of a world treasureof genetic material. In many areas of the island, we harbour essential water reserves.

We must recognize, however, again as stated by the Chair of the WCPA in the newsletter, that the anti-parks argument has a point, and "is also a call to us to re-examine our own values." Hence, at the riskof being deemed "guilty of (…) 'out with the old and in with the new' kind of thinking" (Phillips, 1999),we join numerous others who have preceded us on this issue, and wish to share with you some keyquestions about PAs and their impact on people.

Our presentation goes one step beyond the stated goal of improving PA management, by asking if allpark creation is legitimate.

The Biodiversity Argument

What do we plan to protect, or further, what do we pretend to protect? Is it biological diversity? JeffMcNeely submits, in Conservation of biodiversity and the New Regional Planning, that: "Plannersshould also be aware that strict protection does not always lead to more biodiversity." (McNeely, 1995)The fact that some areas of highly diversified agriculture are far more diverse biologically than socalled "natural areas" is now largely recognized.

Furthermore, as recently stated by the IUCN Inter-Commission Task Force on Indigenous Peoples:"Researchers have "discovered" that many so-called natural landscapes are in fact created or modifiedby human activities over millennia." (IUCN, 1997) Some areas considered as "natural" by many are in

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fact landscapes that have been largely affected by human activity centuries ago. In Madagascar, do weknow for sure that no lemurs have ever been introduced to areas outside their natural range, centuriesago, by Malagasy children accompanying migrant parents?

In other cases, the true condition of the land is known, but nevertheless deemed worthy of protection.In Canada, some of Parks Canada PAs contain very little purely natural systems. Large portions of LaMauricie National Park have been logged, and replanted, a long time ago, and most of its lakes andrivers had been used for angling and for hunting for decades prior to the creation of the park. InEngland, partly because there is so little "nature" left, there is a programme to preserve "culturallandscapes". In Madagascar, the colonists have, for centuries, introduced tree species that are nowacknowledged and unseparable components of the flora in many protected areas.

Why is it that the human activity which created such "landscapes" was legitimate enough decades agothat its expression is worth preserving today, when the same type of activity is considered inadmissiblenow in so called "protected areas"? New ecosystems have emerged with time, would you say? Thenwhat about new ecosystems in the future? Or is it currently what IUCN Category VI stands for? Thiscategory, which applies to managed resource protected areas, relates to "predominantly naturalsystems" and thus implies that resources can indeed be managed within such systems. How natural arethey, then?

All in all, if protecting "natural" biodiversity is admittedly not always the real priority for PAs, morespecifically when talking about IUCN Categories V and VI, shouldn't we be more open to the conceptof alternate options to full or ambiguous "protection", for certain areas?

The Protection Argument

There is more to the above than just the question of concept and of words. There is the significantquestion of perception. While some traditional leaders, mostly in remote areas, consider developmentbad because their experience with modern development has been detrimental to their people, others, intheir own context, perceive protection negatively because it deprives them of traditional sources ofgoods.

Protection is undoubtedly often essential. However, there are more and more indications that the ideaof "protection for its own sake" is starting to crack apart. For example, WWF's 1997 rejection ofCategory VI as applicable to "protected forest areas" has now been reviewed. How much of protectionis motivated essentially by our urge to reach goals spelled in terms of "percentage of land protected"?It is worth noting that some of these goals have been set even before the "sustainable use" conceptcame about. If "protection" is often perceived by neighbouring communities as detrimental to people,and is not always effective for conservation, maybe our choice should go to initiatives better suited tolocal communities. These could be more easily promoted, and would likely yield equivalent, if notbetter, results for the environment.

Some of you will remember the passionate discussions in IUCN, attimes painful, over Categories V, VI and VII, just over a decade ago.Unfortunately, it may already be timely to start such discussions allover again. Should we begin talking about "sustainable use areas"instead of protected areas? "Protected" and "sustainably exploited"could be two super-categories. These would then be subdivided intocategories somewhat equivalent to those which exist right now, albeitexpanded to help clarify current ambiguities. Categories I to IVwould go under "protected", and V to ? under "sustainablyexploited".

The Science Argument

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On the other hand, when parks aim for the conservation of biodiversity, it can be assumed that thecriteria for their selection and submission as a PA candidate are, or should be, rigorously scientific.

As stated by Annette Lee in Expanding Partnership in Conservation "Campaigns by environmentNGOs to establish protected areas are usually based on the biological and wilderness values of aparticular area." (Lee, 1995) This obviously applies to governments too. Good decisions are based ongood science, we say. Then, how do we choose these sites? Throughout the years, a range of methodshas been used, from the very basic to the quite sophisticated.

In many cases, information was scarce. In 1970, Canada was one of the few countries to launch asystematic resource inventory program which had an impact on the degree of knowledge considered,required for the submission of an area as a candidate for protection.

A number of PAs have been created with the purpose of protecting one habitat only, at times withbarely basic knowledge of the ecosystem. Others have been established based on assumptions morethan on information. Occasionally, the assumption made has been that the area protected was"natural", where more in-depth surveys would have shown that the land was historic landscape morethan pristine nature. At other times, the assumption has been that the protected area status would curemost ailments, but downstream results were poor because of insufficient or irrelevant preliminaryresearch.

All in all, with time, the PA community has come to recognize shortcomings in the process of selectingsites, and has reached the conclusion that system planning based on systematic inventories, coupledwith high quality science, was the choice approach. However, we know that, unfortunately, theseprecepts are not applied equally in all countries and by all organizations.

In light of the above, can we pledge that, for each case submitted for the creation of a new PA, thequality of our science is adequate? That highly visible and aggressive NGOs have no undue impactany more? That analysis has cut no short corners? That second choices are never approved because"we have to do something"? That the minimal risk factor is only applied based on sound assessment ofrisks to the people? That the potential for recovery of the environment, and for sustainable use, or for amore "people friendly" alternative, has been seriously considered and rigorously assessed?

The Development Argument

At times, the tables are turned and the key argument used for the creation of a park is "benefit to thepeople", whereby PAs are presented as a stepping stone for regional development. This is certainly thecase in Madagascar. As more and more consideration has been given to alleviating the negativeimpacts of PAs on neighbouring communities, this argument has been increasingly used, at times withsurprisingly effective results.

However, in many cases such development is scheduled to happenoutside protected areas. It will not prevent communities beingdeprived of their traditional source of goods, and it can entailsignificant cultural impact whether it happens outside or inside.Moreover, the schemes and plans are more often than not submitted,even promoted, by people from the outside, who have their owncultural bias, and whose legitimate drive for conservation inclinesthem to optimistic analysis. In Madagascar, for example, efforts toincrease the yield for local rice production have borne little fruit insome areas, for a number of reasons including the fact that thetargeted population cannot always adapt to the required adjustmentsto their traditional lifestyle.

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One of the harsher judgements about the impact of a modern approach to local development was madeby the IUCN Inter-Commission Task Force on Indigenous People. Talking about tourism, the road todevelopment most often quoted in promoting the economic growth potential that comes with creatingcertain PAs, stated that:

"Tourism can provide benefits for Indigenous Peoples in terms of employment opportunities,infrastructural improvements and income from trade. However, when the tourist industry reaches areasinhabited by Indigenous People it results in exploitation of local peoples, abuses of their human rights,and the debasement of their culture." (IUCN, 1997)

The advocates of ecotourism will counter that their form of environmentally friendly tourism canalleviate such problems. However, one cannot ignore this, as stated by Martha Honey in a recent bookafter extensive research and analysis, "Ecotourism is far from fulfilling its promise to transform theway in which modern, conventional tourism is conducted. With few exceptions, it has not succeeded inmoving beyond a narrow niche market to a set of principles and practices that infuses the entire tourismindustry." (Honey, 1999)

What direction should we consider, then?

In 1997, the same IUCN Inter-Commission Task Force on Indigenous Peoples stated that "The right todevelopment for Indigenous Peoples includes (a) the right to seek development on their territories, and(b) the right to seek development on their own terms." (IUCN, 1997)

Jeff McNeely had already written that "Traditional agriculture can contribute to easing the stress ofchanging conditions in rural areas, help conserve biodiversity, and maintain healthy relationshipsbetween rural people and the land." (McNeely, 1995)

This underscores the need to give more serious consideration to local traditions in contemplatingdevelopment around protected areas. Moreover, it indirectly advocates that people be allowed toremain on their land. Is it always desirable then, and even required, to impose upon them theconstraints and restrictions that come with a PA status?

In "Managing Conflicts in Protected areas", IUCN lists approaches "that can be employed to providebenefits to local people" (IUCN, 1996) in a protected area context:

• providing access to resources in protected areas on some regulated/controlled basis• providing local people with alternatives so that they do not have to depend on protected area

resources• offering employment, a portion of fees, or other direct benefits from the protected area• improving the socio-economic conditions of local communities• providing compensation to local people for losses they have incurred as a result of the proximity of

the protected areas.

On the one hand we would have liked to read a "what if" conclusion to this list: if this proves too hardto achieve, or if the odds of real tangible benefits for local people appear too remote, one should lookfor solutions other than the creation of a PA. On the other hand, we pose the hypothesis that, if all ofthe above were achieved in a multi-use area or a model forest context, there would be no need for a PA.

The Dollar Argument

In the WCPA's magazine PARKS, Alexander James stresses that "The average adequacy of protectedarea agency budgets in developing countries is around 31%". (James, 1999)

On average, then, we must assume that each new PA created in a developing country will be grosslyunderfunded. Moreover, it has been acknowledged for many years that the lack of appropriate fundingis one of the essential factors for the poor effectiveness of many PAs. Do we sincerely believe that therecent thrust for improved management effectiveness, and the right for agencies to retain revenues, willresolve everything? Very few national parks systems can pretend to be self-sustainable based onrevenues. South Africa is often quoted as an example, because it recovers 70% of its cost. It is worthnoting, however, that Kruger National Park alone generates 80% of these revenues.

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Shall we keep on perpetuating this major problem indefinitely, and make it even worse by creating newconventional PAs all the time? Have we, along with the major donors, too readily disregarded theopportunity costs of continuing to indiscriminately fund the now questionable application of the PAconcept? Shall we ignore that this application is so ineffective in many cases that, based on thefindings of the WWF/World Bank Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use, a quarter ofthe protected areas in ten key forest countries were currently suffering degradation and only 1% areconsidered to be wholly secure. (WWF and the World Bank, 1997)

The above implies that, if the situation is equivalent in other countries, we are now applying asubstantial amount of donors' money to PAs that could most likely be put to better use if applied toother conservation programmes with a greater focus on community-based resource management. Italso suggests that there could be more money for parks where protection is a high priority, namelycategories I to IV, if less was spent on PAs of questionable value and effectiveness.

Where to from here?

Are there solutions to the issue of appropriateness for the creation of PAs? We believe so.

Firstly, we submit that any effort to address this issue should be an intrinsic part of the process alreadyinitiated by WCPA for the assessment of management effectiveness of PAs (Hockings and Phillips,1999). Such assessment should, in our judgement, embrace the whole process of PA management,including the creation phase. Steps must be taken to promote a PA creation process that would be morerealistic in considering the long-term fate of new parks.

More specifically, the "Capacity to Manage" diagram proposed in PARKS (Hockings and Phillips,1999), should make clear provision for "system planning" and for "quality of science". Theseundoubtedly stand very high on the list of priority components for the effective management of PAsystems.

Secondly, as suggested by the above, system planning must be considered essential for assessing thevalidity and suitability of resource allocation for the creation of new PAs. It sets a framework, withoutwhich the overall context for action, and for management effectiveness, can hardly be measured. Allefforts already initiated to encourage countries to develop system plans must be revitalized, and newpromotional activities launched as required. It is very hard to effectively manage PAs that have anunclear purpose and mandate, and whose existence is hard to justify in the face of controversy and ofpopulations who show opposition. Ultimately, good system planning, along with the appropriatereviews, should lead to the reclassification of costly and ineffective PAs.

Thirdly, more information should be published about, and more consideration given to, the full cost ofcreating and operating PAs. This information, that we would rather see swept under the rug at times, isessential. Decisions concerning the creation of new PAs must be made with full awareness of the realcost for development and for downstream operations. True detailed costing is a must. In assuming thatthe WCPA process for assessing management effectiveness will promote improved financialmanagement, such information will be made increasingly available. As already suggested by one of theauthors for this presentation, at the Global Biodiversity Forum #5 in Buenos Aires (Leclerc, 1996),donors should require all proposals for funding PAs to include a section on eventual sustainablefinancing, and provide money as required for professional business planning to be done.

Fourthly, protected area professionals and managers have to be more opened to, and more involvedwith, sustainable use experts and practitioners. Both groups have to work hand in hand, preferably inthe context of an ecoregional approach. Their aim would be to identify jointly the most promisingavenues for promoting and applying sustainable use and people friendly solutions to degradationproblems. When Category V and VI PAs are considered, it may be advisable in many cases that a PAstatus be envisaged as a last resort rather than as a first choice.

Finally, we suggest that WCPA, in cooperation with maybe the IUCN Commission on EnvironmentalStrategy & Planning (CESP), create a task force on new visions that could work within, or parallel to,the existing Task Force on Management Effectiveness. Among such new visions, alternate optionsproven effective have definite potential for helping to improve the management effectiveness of PA

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systems. Many exist and have been applied, with various degrees of success, admittedly. We are notalways informed well enough about the range of alternate solutions, nor about their successes andfailures. This task force could work jointly with groups and people in the United Nations (UnitedNations) (United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP), and others), the World Bank, and major NGOs, who are already conducting evaluations ofvarious approaches to development in a sustainable use context. This would allow the task force torapidly gather, analyse, and publish fact sheets on alternate options and their application, and asrequired, provide lists of resource people, and give awareness sessions.

One of the main focuses for this Task Force should be to look for solutions to the land tenure issue.These solutions would apply where alternate options are envisaged. One of the key advantages of thePA status is that it usually requires clear ownership or control of the land, while community-basedresource management is most often plagued with insecurity in that regard.

Conclusion

In concluding, we wish to reiterate our belief that PAs are important, and our conviction that theyremain an essential tool for the effective protection of biological diversity. They are warranted in mostcases, and we can hardly disregard them as choice means of protection for strategic resources likewater, for rare and endangered ecosystems, and for genetic material.

However, we submit that in the case of areas where IUCN Categories V and VI are considered, it maybe desirable in certain cases to envisage alternate options that local communities would find morehuman-friendly. We are concerned that the PA approach is at times applied indiscriminately. Thisleads to very fragile foundations for management effectiveness, and entails option costs that can hardlybe tolerated in a context of scarce resources and of dire needs for the true protection of prioritybiodiversity areas.

In this context, another concern already mentioned is the importance given to reaching goals forprotection that are based on a "percentage of land protected". As demonstrated in past discussionsover what constitutes protection, at IUCN in the 1980s and, more recently, in the context of theWWF/World Bank Alliance, this can be quite academic and lead to rather unproductive expenses ofresources and energy. In admitting that the realistic goal for conservation in our modern world issustainable use, why then persist in measuring nature preservation mainly in terms of percentage ofland fenced in under protected area status? Who is to be given the final say on where to draw the linebetween protection and sustainable use, and when?

Our world presents a continuum of unclassifiable levels of nature degradation, withpristine nature at the top, and megacities at the bottom end. The level of natureprotection deemed appropriate for various regions can only depend on a number ofcontextual factors that must include the essential needs of populations. Developingcountries have little to do with theoretical scales, and have no choice but to considernature protection in the realm of socio-economic growth. In our region, the westernIndian Ocean, the highest rate of recent economic and social progress has been postedby Mauritius, a neighbour island where all nature except for a very small patch hasbeen replaced in recent times by sugar cane and a vegetable called "chouchou". Inthis particular context, the virtually total elimination of natural biological diversityparallels better overall health, lower death rate at birth, and higher life expectancy.Evidently, Mauritius cannot be considered a model, but it certainly constitutes anotable reality check for anyone who neglects to appreciate nature protection in itsproper perspective.

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References

Fuller, Kathryn & Wolfensofn, James : "Actions, Not Words, are Needed to SaveForests", New Jersey's Bergen Record, March 14, 2000

Hockings, Marc and Phillips, Adrian : "How well are we doing? - some thoughts onthe effectiveness of protected areas", PARKS, June 1999

Honey, Martha : "Ecotourism and Sustainable Development; Who Owns Paradise?"(Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1999)

IUCN Inter-Commission Task Force on Indigenous Peoples : "Indigenous Peoplesand Sustainability; Cases and Action" (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, 1997)

James, Alexander M. : "Institutional Constraints to Protected Area Funding", PARKS,June 1999

Leclerc, Antoine :"Generating Revenue in your Backyard - A worthy approach tofinancing biodiversity", for the IUCN Global Biodiversity Forum #5, WorldConservation Union, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1996

Lee, Annette : "Innovative Partners; The Value of Nongovernment Organizations inEstablishing Managing Protected Areas", Expanding Partnership in Conservation

Lewis, Connie : "Managing Conflicts in Protected Areas" (Gland, Switzerland, andCambridge, UK: Keystone Center and IUCN, 1996)

McNeely, Jeff A. : "Biodiversity Conservation and Traditional Ecosystems",Conservation of Biodiversity and the New Regional Planning, Richard E. Saunier andRichard A. Meganck Editors (OAS and IUCN, 1995)

Mwamfupe, David : "Demographic Impacts on Protected Areas and Options forAction", PARKS, February 1998

Phillips, Adrian : "Message from the Chair of WCPA", WCPA Newsletter, Number78, June 1999

Zube, Ervin H. : "No Park is an Island", reproduced in Expanding Partnership inConservation (Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1995)

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The Tropical Forestry Action Programme (TFAP) Process — Lessonsfrom Ethiopia and Zambia

Ermias Bekele

AbstractIn addition to reducing poverty or more generally attaining overall social andeconomic development, addressing the issue of environmental degradation is one ofthe principal challenges which policy makers face in the opening decades of the 21st

century. Indeed, with the ever-increasing pressures to address human needs, ForestProtected Areas have continued to increasingly become threatened “islands” in a seaof rural development. The integration of Protected Areas objectives with those ofnational/regional development is central if current rates of land degradation,deforestation and loss of biodiversity are to be reversed. Political and public supportfor Protected Areas is contingent on how effectively such Protected Areas systemscontribute to meeting societal requirements. Critical are the ecological, social,economic, political, land use/tenure, and policy and institutional issues, which directlyaffect the day to day activities of local communities living in and around ProtectedAreas. Experiences in relation to CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe, AdministrativeManagement Design for Game Management Areas (ADMADE) in Zambia,community-based resource management in Namibia, and Food and AgriculturalResearch Management Limited (FARM) Africa and the German TechnicalCooperation Agency (GTZ) Adaba-Dodola Integrated Forest Management in Ethiopiaare encouraging options from which some lessons could be drawn.

Ermias BekeleProject LeaderDGIS-WWF Ethiopia ProjectP.O.Box 13113Addis AbabaETHIOPIAemail:wwfethio@telecom.net.et

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The Tropical Forestry Action Programme (TFAP) Process — Lessonsfrom Ethiopia and Zambia

Ermias Bekele

INTRODUCTION

The need to integrate conservation and development objectives has becomeincreasingly real as we enter the first decades of the 21st century. With an ever-increasing gap between countries of the "haves” and the “have nots”, most developingcountries have continued to experience increasing population levels, on the one hand,and increasing severity in food insecurity, poverty levels and environmentaldegradation on the other.

Global concern over environmental degradation, particularly the ever-increasing rateof deforestation and land degradation, began in the early 1980s. Key strategies andaction measures were launched, starting with the initiation of a series of NationalConservation Strategies (NCS) by IUCN in the early 1980s, and the Tropical ForestryAction Programme (TFAP) in 1985 under the sponsorship of the Food andAgricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Bank, the UnitedNations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Resources Institute (WRI).These were followed by other initiatives including the preparation of bilaterallyfinanced Forestry Master Plans, the World Bank sponsored National EnvironmentalAction Plans (NEAPs), and the United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP)/Permanent Inter-States Committee on Drought Control in the Sahel (CILLS)spearheaded National Plans for Combating Desertification (PNLCDs).

It was, however, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development(UNCED) meeting in Rio, that key forest and forest-related issues effectivelyattracted world attention. The conference not only adopted the "Forest Principles"and "Agenda 21" of which Chapter 11 addresses the issue of "CombatingDeforestation" but also, and most importantly, explicitly recommended NationalForest Programmes (NFPs) as potential tools for their implementation. UNCED andits follow-up further led to the establishment of the United Nations Commission onSustainable Development and subsequently its powerhouse, the Inter-GovernmentalPanel on Forests (IPF). The IPF was mandated to carry out in-depth analysis of thekey and inter-related categories of forest and forest-related issues.

The IPF, through its Final Report adopted by the Special Session of the UnitedNations General Assembly held from 9 to 13 June, 1997, declared the concept of"National Forest Programmes"(NFPs) as a key and global strategic and operationalframework, whose development needs must be dictated by the objective realities ofthe country under concern. The NFPs were further characterized as a process bywhich decisions are the outcome of debates, negotiations and commitments amongkey stakeholders, as well as the need for NFPs formulation and implementation to beguided by the socio-economic, cultural, political and environmental situation of eachcountry (IPF Secretariat, 1997).

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Lessons have begun to emerge from the TFAP/NFPs process, particularly when itcomes to integrating conservation and development objectives. Despite the seeminglygenuine wish of most governments, however, efforts in their implementation havebeen far from successful. Hosts of factors need addressing if the TFAP/NFPs process,as a powerful vehicle for effective Protected Areas Systems (PAS) management, is tohelp promote the mainstreaming of PAS into national development strategies. It is thepurpose of this paper to bring out the TFAP/NFPs lessons from Ethiopia and Zambia.

Topics covered in the paper are key challenges and lessons to achieve conservationand development objectives, the TFAP/NFPs process and its strengths and challenges.The key lessons learned in the process of developing TFAP/NFPs and critical factorsin integrating PAS into national development strategies are other topics treated in thepaper. The Ethiopian initiatives in Pilot Participatory Forest Management, as aninnovative tool toward TFAP/NFPs implementation, has also been included asAnnex 1.

KEY CHALLENGES AND LESSONS TO ACHIEVECONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVES

The past five decades have seen the world move into an eco-development(conservation and development) landscape that is characterized by an ever-wideningmargin between and in the economies of low-income, lower middle-income, middle-income, and high-income countries. An immediate implication of such disparity ineconomic growth is the obvious need to not only uplift the economies of manycountries, but also ensure that development addresses economic growth and equallyimportant social, cultural and environmental goals.

The principal challenges faced by conservationists, development thinkers, and policymakers in the opening decades of the 21st century are, thus, the issues of slowingdown environmental degradation, including biodiversity losses, desertification,climate change, etc., reducing poverty, improving water availability, addressingpopulation growth, mitigating gender inequality, and minimizing cultural losses.

Any meaningful intervention to address the above challenges must take cognizance ofthe important lessons learned in conservation and development thinking and theevolving trends toward eco-development in the 21st century. The following are keyconservation and development related lessons (Bekele, 1999; Dudley et al. 1999; andthe World Bank, 2000):

• Addressing human needs is central in the realization of conservation objectives.• Building meaningful partnerships with key stakeholders and empowerment of

local communities is critical in PAS success.• Immediate conservation focus needs to be on improving management

effectiveness of existing network of PAs.• Mustering political/public support is a key area for improvement toward

conservation success.• Integrated policy packages and institutional environments are central for

conservation and development efforts to succeed.

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• Processes are just as important as policies; policies developed in a transparent,participatory and consensual manner are likely to be more sustainable thanotherwise.

• Sustainable development is not limited to raising per capita income only. Itinvolves meeting other objectives, such as better health services and educationalopportunities, gender equity, greater participation in shaping one’s destiny, aclean environment and more.

THE TROPICAL FORESTRY ACTION PROGRAMME (TFAP)/NATIONAL FORESTRY PROGRAMMES (NFPs) PROCESS

A. The TFAP/NFPs Concept

The TFAP/NFPs approach has been central and continues to play a key role in theformulation of forest sector strategic plans. The TFAP, through its "Basic Principlesand Operational Guidelines" (FAO, 1996), has particularly been an important tool forawareness creation and key stakeholder participation. The NFPs approach as “ageneric expression for the sequence of events related to the formulation,implementation and revision process of forest sector plans” provides a globalframework to address forestry within the context of sustainable development”. Itencompasses "a wide range of approaches to sustainable forest management withindifferent countries, implemented in the context of each country's socio-economic,cultural, political, and environmental situations and integrated into wider programmesfor sustainable land use, in accordance with Chapters 10 to 15 of Agenda 21, takinginto account the activities of other sectors, such as agriculture, energy and industrialdevelopment." (IPF Secretariat, 1997). The NFPs process entails a lengthyconsensus-building process on forest and forest-related issues, strategies, andproviding actions for intervention. It also provides rich opportunities for importantlesson learning.

The preparation and implementation of NFPs is specifically designed to increaseeffectiveness and efficiency in sustainable forest management at the country level,leading potentially to increased funding from domestic and external sources. Nationalsovereignty and country leadership; consistency with national policies andinternational commitments; integration with a country's sustainable developmentstrategies; partnership and participation; and holistic and inter-sectoral approaches arekey elements in the formulation and implementation of the NFPs process (Bekele,1998a and 1998b).

In terms of implementation and taking the African continent as an example, as of late1998, 20 countries in Africa have their National Forest Plans or Programmescompleted but, of these, only eight are implementing them. The NFPs planningprocess was at an initial stage and/or has been interrupted in 12 countries (FAO,1998).

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B. Description of the Ethiopian and Zambian Forestry Action Programmes(EFAP and ZFAP) Formulation Process

Preparations of both the Ethiopian (1994) and Zambian (1997)Forestry Action Programmes (EFAP and ZFAP) were nationalefforts involving many professionals and local institutions. At thenational level, EFAP/ZFAP secretariats were established tocoordinate planning activities, with technical support from the WorldBank and FAO. A respective National Programme SteeringCommittee played a key role with regard to policy guidance andoverall monitoring of project activities, both in Ethiopia and Zambia.

The planning and consensus building process of both the EFAP and ZFAP have beentruly inter-sectoral, multi-disciplinary, demand-driven, country-led, participatory andtransparent in approach. These were realized through combination of the followingmeasures:

• production of an issues paper and inception report• conducting various regional/provincial information/orientation seminars• holding a series of brainstorming sessions to identify sectoral issues for in-depth

analysis• commissioning various issue-oriented studies by task forces and working groups

(including a special one on gender in forestry)• deployment of national and international consultants to review and make a

preliminary analysis of sectoral issues identified• holding various theme-oriented technical workshops• holding various regional/provincial and national seminars• production of the national/provincial Forestry Action Plan• holding a round table donors conference

More specifically, some 14 forestry and forestry-related subject areas were identifiedand studied, by task forces and consultants, as part of an in-depth analysis of theforest and wildlife sub-sectors. Critical areas studied varied from the role andlinkages of forestry in land use to farm forestry, soil and water conservation, livestockproduction, forest economics and management, forest industries, wood fuel energy,role of women/gender/youth in forestry, and forestry research, education, andextension. Sectoral integration and multi-disciplinarity were further reinforcedthrough the broad-based participation of many forest and forest sector relatedstakeholders. Representations of local communities, traditional rulers and healers(in the case of Zambia), government at all levels, the private sector, professionalsand academics, women’s groups, Community Based Organizations(CBOs), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and members of the donor community were allinvited to participate in various ways.

C. Guiding Principles

Development of the sub-sectoral strategic framework and associated sub-programmes was based on a new and sharply focused set of guiding principles.These principles arose at every stage of the consensus-building process andincluded:

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• Sustainable Resource Management. To aim for sustainable forest/wildlifemanagement, i.e. meeting the needs of the current generation without threateningthe chances of future generations to do the same.

• Capacity Development. To ensure effective management and a sense ofownership of forest and wildlife resources, it is important to develop stakeholdersand/or institutional capacity at all levels.

• Participatory Approach. To help resolve conflicts of interest, which arisebetween state agencies, local communities, individuals and the private sector.

• Private Sector Forest Development. Lessons learned from many state-runforestry institutions are that many of their commercial operations could be betterhandled by the private sector.

• Gender Equity and Youth Participation. Ensuring gender equity in all aspectsor forestry/wildlife is long overdue and of fundamental importance. Equallyimportant is the need to promote participation to tap the creativity, ideals andcourage of the youth to contribute toward conservation and development.

• Sectoral Integration. It is essential that there is coordination among all land-based sectors, through strengthened institutional collaborative arrangements at alllevels and the production and implementation of proper land-use plans. There isalso a further call for the development and promotion of holistic strategies, whichintegrate conservation, development, and management of forest/wildlife resourceswith crop and livestock production, genetic, land, water and energy resources.

D. Phases and Outputs

Processing of the TFAP, both in Ethiopia and Zambia, involved the following sixinter-linked and, in most cases, overlapping phases:• preparatory/mobilization• review by task forces• sector analysis by national & international consultants• preparation of draft main report• review and adoption of main report by government• holding of the donor's round table and initiation of programme

implementation.

Respectively, a total of 131 and 112 documents were produced in the course of theEFAP and ZFAP planning and consensus-building processes. These includedbackground documents, technical reports (by task forces and consultants), annexes,maps, workshop/seminar proceedings, minutes (of meetings), bibliography andnewsletters. The EFAP exercise also involved some 20 video-audio cassetterecordings.

E. Sub-Programmes Developed

The Tree and Forest Production/Development Sub-ProgrammeEight and seven sub-programmes respectively were developed in the course of theEFAP and ZFAP preparations. These are a series of inter-related and complementarysub-programmes for which corresponding objectives, strategies, specific actions, aswell as project profiles were developed. They were, for operational purposes, divided

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into "primary/core" and "supportive" development sub-programmes. Thoughdifferent in approach and emphasis, both the EFAP and ZFAP had four"primary/core" development sub-programmes. The "primary/core" sub-programmeswere front-line intervention areas, which are meant to directly impact the forest sectorobjectives developed. They are:

• culture of tree/forest asset creation and ultimately increases the sustainable supplyof forest products. This marked the thrust for the EFAP.

• The Indigenous Forest Management and Biodiversity Conservation(ZFAP)/Forest Resources and Ecosystems Management (EFAP) Sub-Programme intends to manage and utilize the forest resources and biologicaldiversity in Protected Area networks. The thrust for ZFAP lay on this sub-programme.

• The Forest Industries Development (EFAP)/Forest Industry and Non-WoodForest Products (ZFAP) Sub-Programme aims to promote the forest industriesand non-wood forest products sub-sector on the basis of principles of commercialviability and sustainable management and utilization of forest resources.

• The Fuel Wood Energy Efficiency Development Sub-Programme is aimed atend-use efficiency and to reduce dependency on bio-fuels.

The core development sub-programmes were complemented by four EFAP and threeZFAP supportive development sub-programmes, as well as policy/legislative andinstitutional reform initiatives. Each of these supportive sub-programmes wasdesigned to reinforce and facilitate the realization of objectives of the coredevelopment sub-programmes. The supportive development sub-programmes are:

• The Technology Development and Dissemination (EFAP)/ Forestry Researchand Extension (ZFAP) Sub-Programme aims to strengthen capacity togenerate, test and disseminate relevant technologies related to the sustainablemanagement and utilization of forest resources.

• The Human Resources Development (EFAP)/Forestry Education andTraining (ZFAP) Sub-Programme intends to secure the trained personnelneeded to conserve, develop and manage forests and forest related resources in astrengthened, gender sensitive, multi-disciplinary and sustainable manner.

• The Policy, Planning and Monitoring & Evaluation (EFAP & ZFAP) Sub-Programme is aimed at creating, developing and institutionalizing policy,planning, monitoring, and evaluation capabilities for the forest sub-sector.

• The Sectoral Integration (EFAP only) Sub-Programme aims to improve theplanning and management of land resources to arrest land degradation.

The cross-cutting forest sector policy/legislation and institutional reformmeasures aim at changing the existing forest policy/legislation/act and institutionalarrangements, to create an enabling environment for the implementation of gender-balanced, participatory and sustainable management and utilization of forestresources.

F. Indicative Investment Requirements

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Overall, an estimated total of US$1.2 billion was needed, over a period of 20 years, toimplement the eight sub-programmes under the EFAP (US$506 million must comefrom the public sector and US$726 million from the private sector). Thecorresponding 20 years investment requirement for the ZFAP was a total of US$294million, of which the public sector requirement was US$89 million and that of theprivate sector US$205 million.

G. Programme Implementation Arrangements, Impacts and CurrentStatus

Institutional arrangements for programme implementation were proposed both forthe EFAP and ZFAP. In the case of Ethiopia, the proposal was to elevate the EFAPSecretariat into an EFAP Implementation Unit, which, together with the NationalConservation Strategy Secretariat, was to form the National Programme CoordinationSecretariat, within the then Ministry of Natural Resources Development andEnvironmental Protection. The proposed role of the EFAP Implementation Unit wasto facilitate the formulation of Regional Forestry Action Programmes as well as themobilization of financial and technical resources for EFAP implementation atappropriate levels.

Similar arrangements were also proposed for implementation of the ZFAP.Arrangements, in this case, were further facilitated through transformation of theForestry Department into the Zambia Forestry Authority (ZFA) and the cleardefinition of roles and responsibilities of all key stakeholders for ZFAPimplementation. Clarity in roles and responsibility was made, not only for thegovernment entities including the ZFAP National Steering Committee, but also localcommunities, women & youth groups, the private sector, CBOs, NGOs and membersof the international donor community.

Apart from enhanced awareness creation at the forest and forest-related sectoral levelsand the public at large, the immediate positive impacts of both the EFAP & ZFAPexercises included:

• Adoption of both the EFAP and ZFAP/PFAP main documents by the respectivegovernments and donors community.

• Issuance of Proclamation 94/1994 for the Conservation, Development andManagement of Forests (Ethiopia) and the 1998 National Forestry Policy as wellas the Statutory Instrument No-1998 Act Joint Forest Management Regulation forlimited Forest Reserves (Zambia) (Forest Department, 1998).

• Transformation of the Forestry Department into a Forestry Authority (Zambia).

Current status In the case of Ethiopia, there has been no major implementation,with the exception of limited and small projects by a few donors. Government effortswere limited to the initiation of six and finalization of two Regional Forestry ActionProgrammes (through UNDP support) out of the country’s nine regional states. Otherdonors’ support included the development of a management plan for the Belete-GeraNational Forest Priority Area (by the JICA) and in-depth studies of the Ethiopianbamboo and woodland resources (by the GTZ) (see also Annex 1). With theunnecessary delay in holding the Round Table Donors Conference and a host of otherfactors, the ZFAP implementation situation was not encouraging either.

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Possible explanations for weak and/or absence of EFAP/ZFAP implementationinclude a combination of the following factors:

• The lack of a proactive follow-up phase to the EFAP/ZFAP formulation process,which could have facilitated the development of region specific priority projectsfor immediate implementation with clearly identified implementers.

• The unavailability of financial resources due to pressing issues including theextreme poverty that the countries/governments under concern have to grapplewith.

• Weak policy/legislative/institutional arrangements (especially in the case ofEthiopia).

• Ever-eroding technical and institutional capacity at the federal, regional and lowergovernment levels (though possibly good in the long term, regionalization inEthiopia, for instance, had short-term impacts on capacity by dilution ofexperience leading to deterioration of PA management).

• Poor financial and technical resource flows from the international donorcommunity as a function of "conditionality" related to SAP, governance, humanrights, etc.

• Poor past records including lack of accountability, transparency, etc. in projectimplementation by governments.

• Lack of impact from past forest and wildlife related interventions.• Lack of incentives for local communities, the private sector, etc. to actively

participate in forest/wildlife resource conservation and development.• Lack of proactive political/government support for the forest/wildlife sub-sectors.• Limited conservation awareness on the part of decision makers and the public at

large.• Lack of peace and stability.• Drought and famine and wildfires, which aggravate the situation.• Donor fatigue.

TFAP/NFPs STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

Analysis of experiences both from Ethiopia and Zambia and for Africa, as a whole,reveals the following TFAP/NFP strengths :

• Developed forest/wildlife sub-sector strategic planning and operational frameworkin a consensus building transparent, participatory, and multi-disciplinarymanner.

• Adopted/integrated into the Agriculture Development Led Industrialization (in thecase of Ethiopia) and the Five Years (in the case of Zambia) NationalDevelopment Strategy as well as regional/provincial initiatives.

• Raised public awareness and enhanced information exchange.• Systematic data generation on the forest and wildlife sub-sectors.• Initiation and adoption of policy/legislation and institutional reforms.• Improved national capacity building and re-definition of the role of key

stakeholders in the forest/wildlife sub-sectors.

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• Improved levels of coordination and harmonization of actions throughdevelopment of strategic frameworks.

• Improved resource mobilization for sub-sectoral development, especially in somecountries.

On the other hand, the following are the major TFAP/NFPs weaknesses experiencedin the course of its formulation and implementation process:

• Lengthy process in which more emphasis was given to the “planning” as opposedto “implementation” stage.

• Absence of a meaningful and up-front capacity building programme to ensureNFPs implementation.

• No and/or limited ACTIONS on the ground, due to lack of clearly identifiedpriority projects and their implementers.

• Lack of enabling policy/legal and institutional environment that encourages theactive involvement of the private sector, local communities and NGOs in NFPsimplementation.

• Lack of effective and impact producing resource mobilization schemes.• Failures in realizing fully inter- and intra-sectoral coordination/linkages.• One of many global/national and competing initiatives thereby leading to both

governments and donors “planning fatigue”.

LESSONS LEARNEDVarious lessons have been learned from the NFPs process. The following areconsidered the key for NFPs to be effective and sustainable (Bekele, 1998b) andinclude the need to:

• develop, implement, monitor and evaluate, as appropriate, NFPs to serve as animportant conservation tool and/or as appropriate, global/national/regional/provincial/local framework for sustainable forest management.

• ensure the NFPs process involves at least four inter-linking and, in many cases,overlapping phases: organization of the process; strategic planning; programmeimplementation; and revision of the NFPs.

• ensure a preparatory/mobilization phase of three to six months to put the NFPsstudy phase into motion. Major activities during this phase normally entail theproduction of an inception report and setting up a fully operational projectsecretariat.

• build a conceptual NFPs framework by preparing an issues paper that provides anoverview of the major sectoral constraints faced and strategic and tacticalmeasures required toward sustainable forest management.

• identify and initiate immediate ACTIONS, as appropriate, for field levelimplementation, without the need to wait till completion of the NFPsformulation process.

• adopt a flexible and demand-driven approach to NFPs processing as this is verymuch a function of the specific socio-economic, cultural, political andenvironmental conditions prevailing in each country.

• ensure national leadership/ownership of the NFPs process and effectivecoordination mechanisms including the initiation of capacity building as oneobjective of the exercise.

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• design and effect appropriate participatory mechanisms to ensure transparency andbroad-based participation of all key stakeholders, particularly localcommunities, the private sector, CBOs, NGOs, etc.

• promote sectoral integration/coordination and the incorporation of genderconcerns as well as appropriate criteria and indicators for SFM into NFPs.

• establish a bottom-up planning and decentralize, as appropriate, the NFPs processat regional/provincial and lower levels.

• ensure appropriate and timely policy/legislative as well as institutional reforms forprogramme implementation.

• develop and implement effective and impact-producing resource mobilizationschemes.

• provide with effective communication mechanisms for information exchangeamong key stakeholders.

CRITICAL FACTORS IN INTEGRATING PROTECTED AREASSYSTEMS (PAS) INTO NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES

Analyses of experiences from the EFAP and ZFAP processes indicate that thefollowing are critical factors in the integration of PAS into national developmentstrategies. These are the issues of poverty, political commitment, land use, processaspects and prioritization and flexibility. A brief account on each issue is as follows:

A. Poverty

Indeed, the first critical challenge in integrating PAS into national developmentstrategies is how effectively PAS can contribute to poverty alleviation, a majordevelopment objective of most developing countries. Contributions that they canmake towards improving livelihoods of local communities could bring substantialreward to forest PAS success. Various opportunities are available for the purpose.The first opportunity is to promote active participation such that communities becomekey actors in the conservation, management, and utilization of forest resources. Thesecond opportunity is to broaden the knowledge base of local residents and strengthentheir traditional institutional capacity, through organizing field visits and possiblystudy tours, to exchange peer experiences both within and outside the country forthem. The third opportunity is to enhance both increases in agricultural productivityand off-farm income for communities living in and around protected areas.

The opportunity to improve agricultural productivity is both long overdue and centralfor two basic reasons. First, given forest/tree clearings for cultivation as the majorreason for the destruction of forests and loss of wildlife habitats, improvements inagricultural productivity would minimize deforestation/land degradation and depletionof wildlife. Secondly, the minimization of forest devastations, as a function ofimprovements in agricultural productivity, contributes to better watershedmanagement. Strategically, increased productivity could be realized through properland use and agricultural intensification, integration of agroforestry/farm/communityforestry practices into farming systems and promotion of watershed management.

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Tactical measures could include rationalization of the agriculture/forestry/wildlifeinterface (through sectoral integration/coordination), agricultural/forest/wildlifepolicy/legislation reforms (especially on issues related to security of land/tree tenure,benefit sharing, incentives, etc), and institutional reforms (with a focus on demand-driven research and an integrated extension network). A re-oriented and strengthenedextension network of multi-purpose development workers (forest and wildlifeincluded) could particularly be critical for the timely delivery of farm operation-related technical advice and agricultural inputs.

B. Political Commitment

The sensitization of decision makers about the need for conservationis one of the critical factors in integrating PAS into developmentobjectives. It is important that policy makers fully understand andappreciate the various quantifiable and unquantifiable contributionsthat protected areas make to national economies, sustainable rurallivelihoods, etc. Forest protected areas are not only important in theprovision of basic forest and non-wood forest products, includingtimber, wood fuel, medicinal plants/pharmaceuticals, but also asreservoirs for wild progenitors of most cultivated germplasms. Theyalso play a central role in the maintenance of ecological integrity andlife support systems as well as meeting socio-cultural values.

It is important that political commitment, at the highest level, isassured through the integration of PAS with development objectivesat all appropriate levels. This is needed for at least three reasons.First, political support through such integration could be animportant image setter and signal for public support. Secondly,there are positive correlations in the mobilization of financial,technical and material resources from within and outside thecountry. Thirdly, it can play a catalytic role in the formulation oftimely macro-economic/sectoral policy/legislative/institutionalreforms and their effective and sustainable implementation.

An enabling policy/legal and institutional environment is critical, if protected areasystems are to effectively discharge their mandate. Unfortunately, real field situationsare such that the policies/legislations/regulations are either outdated or not there, andthe existing institutions either weak and/or not there. The implication and hard fact isthat at present, the majority of protected areas in much of the developing worldneither have the legal status nor receive any form of management. It is important thatthe possible establishment and management of existing protected areas are supportedby long-overdue appropriate policy/legislative and institutional reforms.

Policy/legislative/institutional reforms, as reflections of opportunities in politicalcommitment, are powerful tools to mitigate problems and constraints faced by forest

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and wildlife sub-sectors. The formulation and effective implementation of forest,wildlife and related policies/legislation, could provide countries, where appropriate,the opportunity to examine closely such issues as land/tree tenure, incentives forprivate forest and wildlife development, and collaborative resource management. Theimplementation of complementary tools in the areas of research, extension, educationand public relations, coupled with institutional reforms, could also bring aboutpotentially and equally important political influences.

Opportunities are also available to muster effective political support for the forest andwildlife sub-sectors. As exemplified by the UNCED and its follow-ups, there areuntapped means to win both political and public support for sustainable renewablenatural resources management. The global mushrooming of environment-relatedministries was, for example, one positive development which emanated from theUNCED decisions. Hence, the exploitation of such opportunities could furtherenhance the political interest and commitment in forest and wildlife resources andopportune professionals to "market" conservation objectives better to politicians.

C. Land Use

Land-use related issues are other critical factors that have direct bearing on PASachieving their objectives. For instance, the development and effectiveimplementation of national/regional strategic and local-level land-use plans can playa decisive role in determining the location/design of protected areas and theirmanagement effectiveness and sustainability. The absence of land use plans and/ortheir effective implementation usually raises the problems of inter- and intra-sectoralcoordination. It also influences the relationship between protected areas andsurrounding lands, which often serve as important "buffer" zones. Particularly criticalat the field level are, however, the issues of communities’ secure rights of access toland and natural resources, both within and outside PAS. The recent experiences offormulating and implementing community by-laws (along traditional lines) in relationto collaborative resource management, in some countries, appears to hold promise inaddressing land-use related issues.

D. Process Aspect

The establishment and management of a network of protected areas entail a sequenceof events. It is a consensus-building process in which key stakeholders includingrepresentations from government, professionals, academics, NGOs, the private sector,CBOs, local communities, traditional chiefs/healers, local elders, women and youthsgroup, etc., meet and resolve on key issues and solutions related to the establishmentand management of protected areas. The process also involves not only identifyingroles and responsibilities of cooperating institutions but also soliciting politicalcommitment from decision makers and support from the media. It is important thatsince the process amounts to "learning by doing", the process aspect of protected areamanagement is considered equally important as the output (often a management plan),if not a critical factor as a capacity-building feature.

E. Prioritization and Flexibility

Societies are living in a changing world. Populations in most places are growing atastronomical rates. Resource depletion/degradation is alarming. Poverty levels are

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absolutely unbearable. Meeting human needs is an order of the day. Protected areasystems of the first decades of the 21st century are thus faced with the criticalchallenge of responding to the changing world. This calls for prioritization andflexibility in the establishment and management of existing protected areas. Thefuture selection of protected areas needs to be based on realistic assessment of criticalresource endowments that deserve protection. There might also be the need to revisitexisting criteria for the selection of new PASs and review the merit, practicality andcost effectiveness of holding on to some protected areas in the existing network.Strategically, it may well be that one could be better positioned to save, biologicallyor otherwise, more deserving additional sites by giving up on less critical and/or,currently unmanaged protected areas. In Ethiopia, for example, only two of the nineNational Parks and one of the 57 National Forest Priority Areas have been gazetted.Even these few with legal status are hardly receiving any meaningful management.

CONCLUSIONS

The TFAP Process was launched in the mid 1980s, with the objective of addressingthe alarming rate of deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics. Havingevolved into NFPs it has, presently, become a generically powerful tool forimplementation of the UNCED decisions particularly the “Forest Principles” andAgenda 21, of which Chapter 11 addresses the issue of “Combating Deforestation”.As a key global and operational framework, the NFPs process is guided by the socio-economic, cultural, political and environmental realities of the country under concern.

Operationally, the NFPs process involves four main inter-linking and, in many cases,overlapping phases. These are: organization of the process; strategic planning;program implementation; and revision of the NFPs. Each of these phases presents anumber of challenges. These vary, for example, from the putting in place of anefficient and effective NFPs coordination and steering mechanisms to ensuringsustained NFPs information flow to partners and key stakeholders. Other majorchallenges include the issues of capacity building, policy, legal and institutionalreforms, investment programming, as well as revising and reviewing national andinternational commitments to the NFPs process.

A stock taking of the TFAP/NFPs process shows that despite the substantive positivecontributions recorded, the process still exhibits a far to be desired situation especiallywhen it comes to effectiveness and efficiency in NFPs implementation. This poorperformance in NFPs implementation could be explained as a function of economicand financial constraints, weak technical and institutional capacities, and politicalinstability and/or the lack of political will prevalent in the countries of concern.

Analysis of TFAP/NFPs experiences from Ethiopia, Zambia and elsewhere reveal thefollowing strengths and challenges. Major TFAP/NFPs strengths include:

• Development of sub-sectoral strategic/operational framework in a consensusbuilding process.

• Systematic sub-sectoral data generation.• Initiation and adoption of policy/legislation and institutional reforms.• Raised public awareness and enhanced information exchange.

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On the other hand, the major challenges faced by the TFAP/NFPs processinclude the need to further improve and

• Get ACTIONS on the ground.• Develop effective and impact producing resource mobilization schemes.• Raise national capabilities in policy formulation, planning, project

implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and improve overall inter- andintra- sectoral coordination/linkages.

• Win political/government support at all levels to remove an ever-worsening sub-sectoral financial and institutional status.

• Change out-dated forest- and forest-related policies/legislation.• Integrate gender concerns in NFPs.• Develop, test and incorporate appropriate criteria and indicators for sustainable

forest management in NFPs.

Key lessons learned for effective and sustainable NFPs processing andimplementation include the need to:

• adopt a flexible and demand driven approach to NFPs processing as this is verymuch a function of the specific socio-economic, cultural, political, andenvironmental conditions prevailing in each country

• ensure national leadership/ownership of the NFPs process and initiate capacitybuilding up front

• design and effect appropriate participatory mechanisms to ensure transparency andbroad-based participation of all key stakeholders, particularly local communities

• maximize sectoral integration/coordination/linkages and the incorporation ofgender concerns into NFPs processing

• ensure appropriate and timely policy/legislative and institutional reforms tofacilitate NFPs implementation

• implement ACTIONS without waiting for completion of the NFPs formulationprocess

• develop and implement effective and impact-producing resource mobilizationschemes

• provide effective communication mechanisms for information exchange.

Despite the experiences documented in this paper, Protected Area Systems have failedincreasingly to meet their mandated objectives. Pressure continues to mount in themmeeting both conservation and development objectives. Critical factors to address, inthis regard, are the issues of extremely low poverty levels, political support, land use,prioritization and flexibility and process aspects to PAS establishment andmanagement.

Future success in PAS is, thus, contingent on how effectively and sustainably they canincorporate, in concrete terms, socio-economic, political, and cultural aspects intotheir conservation mandate. As promoted by the IPF, a re-vamped and effective NFPsprocessing is one option for the way forward. The concepts of JFM/PFM orcollaborative management appear also to hold promise. It is perhaps along these linesthat integration could be realized and hopes for the future appear to lie.

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REFERENCES

Bekele, Ermias (1999). Sustainable Forest and Wildlife Management Challenges AndOpportunities into the Millennium's First Decade. Accra: FAO Regional Office forAfrica.

Bekele, Ermias (1998a). Implementation of IPF Proposals for Effective NFPs inAfrica. Accra: FAO Regional Office for Africa.

Bekele, Ermias (1998b). Operational Guidelines to Meet the Challenges Facing theFormulation, Execution and Revision of National Forest Programmes in Eastern andSouthern Africa. Accra: FAO Regional Office for Africa.

Carney, D. (1998). Sustainable Rural Livelihoods. DFID: Russell Press Ltd.

DNPWS (1998). Policy for National Parks and Wildlife in Zambia. Lusaka: Ministryof Tourism.

Dudley, Nigel, et.al. (1999). Challenges for Protected Areas in the 21st Century. In:Partnerships for Protection. Edited by Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley. London:Earthscan Publication Ltd.

EFAP Secretariat (1994). Final Report (EFAP-The Process). Addis Ababa: Ministryof Natural Resources Development and Environmental Protection.

Ethiopia Wildlife Conservation Organization (1998). Forest Conservation in HighPriority Areas Project Document. Addis Ababa: Project Implementation Unit.

FAO (1998). NFPs Update No. 33. Accra: FAO Regional Office for Africa.

FAO (1996). Basic Principles and Operational Guidelines: Formulation, ExecutionAnd Revision of National Forest Programmes. Rome: Food and Nutrition Division.

FARM-Africa (1999a). Chilimo Forest Conservation andDevelopment Project (Phase II Proposal). Addis Ababa: FARM-Africa.

FARM-Africa (1999b). Kafa-Sheka Forest Project (Phase II Proposal). Addis Ababa:FARM – Africa.

Forestry Department (1998). Zambia. National Forest Policy. Lusaka: Ministry ofEnvironment and Natural Resources.

IFMP Secretariat (1999). IFMP Adaba/Dodola Synopsis. Dodola : IFMP.

IPF Secretariat (1997). Final Report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Forests(Advance Un-edited Draft Text). New York: DPCSD/UN.

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Larson, P.S. et.al. (1998). WWF ICDPs: Ten Lessons from the Field. Washington,D.C.: WWF.

The World Bank (2000). Entering the 21st Century World Development Report1999/2000. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.

ZFAP Secretariat (1997). The ZFAP Final Report. Lusaka:Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources.

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ANNEX I : PILOT PARTICIPATORY FOREST MANAGEMENT

(The Ethiopian Initiatives)

a) Ethiopia has, since the early 1990s, been involved in piloting the developmentof methodologies for Participatory Forest Management (PFM). Efforts wereand are being spear headed by international NGOs such as FARM Africa, SOSSahel and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and GTZ, in closecollaboration with Forestry Units at the Federal, Regional and lower levels ofgovernment. Of these, the GTZ sponsored Adaba-Dodola Integrated ForestManagement Project (IFMP) is at an advanced stage for implementation.Covering an area of about 50,000 ha of Ethiopia’s highly, economically, valuedtree species such as Podocarpus gracilior, Juniperus procera and Hygeniaabyssinica, the objective of the IFMP is to conserve the natural forest in theNational Forest Priority Area of Adaba- Dodola.

b) Learning from its four years of past experience, the IFMP is now piloting aninnovative approach of forming forest dwellers associations (of people livinginside the forest) who will be allocated blocks of forest to use on the basis of amanagement plan and legal contractual agreement entered between the projectand the dwellers association. It is envisaged that members of the associationwill protect their block from non-forest dwellers who currently also use theforest. It is also hoped that forest use can be made sustainable by limiting theusers and use level, raising the value of forest timber products (by reducing thesupply) and putting the protection in the hands of forest dwelling communities.

c) At present, a Forest Block Allocation Contract has been drafted, negotiated andapproved by all the key stakeholders: the Federal Forestry Department, theOromiya State Regional Bureau of Agriculture, the village administrations andthe forest dwellers. It is about to go into pilot implementation in three peasantassociations. The following are essential features of the Forest Block AllocationContract (IFMP Secretariat, 1999):

• The size of a group in a block should not exceed 30 members.• The forest block must be sufficiently big to provide for at least 12 ha

per member/household.• Elected founding members/elders select applicants according to

eligibility criteria of their own. Membership is inalienable andindivisible but can be inherited or transacted.

• Use rights concern all products, i.e. grass, crops, etc.• The lease is not limited in time. However, the contract is cancelled if

the tree cover is not maintained or if settlement is increased beyondcarrying capacity. Tree cover and settlement density is re-assessed bythe Federal Forestry Department annually.

• Tree cover determines the annual lease rent. Rent is levied only for thepercentage of land not covered by woody perennial vegetation.

• Payment of lease rent is not by individuals but by the collective.However, each Member is liable for the collective debt. The village

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administration can enforce payment by confiscating livestockbelonging to group members.

• Other sanctions are only applied if tree cover or settlement density isnot maintained, which are the only controls effected.

• Subsidiary by-laws regulate the internal organization of the associationand their forest management scheme technically assisted by theforestry services.

d) The challenges ahead in piloting the Forest Block Allocation Contract willinclude the possibility that:• The formation of the first few groups may not positively impact on

current deforestation.• Initial group formation could prove less attractive to forest dwellers as

they may not wish to face conflicts with needy relatives or enviouscommunity members.

• The lease rent for the forest block will only work if (multiple-use)forests prove as profitable as farming or grazing.

• Problems are likely to arise, not necessarily with intruders but fromnew generations growing up in the forest.

• The IFMP is at crossroads and is could prove a real milestone in thesustainable management of Ethiopia’s limited indigenous forests.

e) In sum, the various PFM related initiatives underway are encouraging but facenumerous challenges in their effort to evolve an approach relevant to theEthiopian context. These challenges, among others, include the need toaddress the following:• What form(s) could PFM take in Ethiopia, and different parts of the

country?• Is genuine participation by local residents in forest management

acceptable to government at all levels? How do you mainstream PFMapproaches into government operations?

• Is government, at all levels, willing to share power of control overforests? And which? N/RFPAs?

• What kinds of forest related benefits are government prepared to share?• Does current policy/legislation permit PFM with genuine participation

and sharing of benefits and responsibilities?• How will forestry staff attain the necessary community development

skills?• How will the impact of PFM be monitored and by whom?• How will the impact on community livelihoods be monitored and by

whom?

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ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

CBOs Community-Based Organization(s)

CILLS Permanent Inter-States Committee on Drought Control in the Sahel

DFID Department for International Development

DGIS Directorate General for International Cooperation

DNPWS Department of National Parks & Wildlife Service

DPCSD Division for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development

EFAP Ethiopian Forestry Action Programme

FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

GTZ German Technical Co-operation Agency

Ha Hectare

ICDPs Integrated Conservation and Development Project(s)

IFMP Integrated Forest Management Project

IPF Inter-Governmental Panel on Forests

JFM Joint Forest Management

JICA Japanese International Cooperation Agency

NCS National Conservation Strategy

NEAPs National Environmental Action Programmes

NFPs National Forest Programmes

NGOs Non-Governmental Organizations

NWFPs Non Wood Forest Products

PA Protected Area

PAS Protected Areas Systems

PFAP Provincial Forestry Action Programme

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PFM Participatory Forest Management

PNLCDs National Plans for Combating Desertification

SAP Structured Adjustment Programme of The World Bank

SFM Sustainable Forest Management

TFAP Tropical Forestry Action Programme

UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and Development

UNDP United Nations Development Programme

UNEP United Nations Environmental Programme

WRI World Resources Institute

WWF World Wide Fund for Nature

ZFA Zambia Forestry Authority

ZFAP Zambia Forestry Action Programme

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Balancing Wildlife Conservation with Local Use when DesigningProtected Area Systems in Tropical Forests

Elizabeth L. Bennett

AbstractTropical forests and human communities are intimately linked. For example, mostpeople living in and around tropical forests derive more than 50 per cent of theirprotein from wild meat. With deforestation, this is increasingly being obtained fromprotected areas (PAs). Hunting is rarely sustainable due to increasing humanpopulation densities, use of technology, sedentarism and participation in a casheconomy. Productivity of tropical forests is so low that each square kilometre of forestcan only sustainably provide for the annual animal protein consumption of a singleperson. Animal protein demand exceeds this in many tropical forests, including inPAs. Loss of browsers, pollinators and dispersers will have detrimental effects onoverall biodiversity, and tie local people into declining resource bases. Developmentsaround PAs frequently exacerbate this by increasing the above problems, andimproving access to towns which results in an unsustainable wildlife trade. Planningat the landscape level is needed, with parks and sanctuaries strictly protected againsthunting so they can fulfil their conservation goal, and act as “sources” of wildlife forsurrounding extractive reserves. Such reserves must be complimented by non-forest,high productivity areas to produce food and wealth, allowing people in tropical forestcountries to meet their needs and aspirations.

Elizabeth BennettSenior Conservationist ZoologistWildlife Conservation Society7 Jalan RidgewayKuchingSarawak 93200MALAYSIAemail: lizwcs@pd.jaring.my

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Balancing Wildlife Conservation with Local Use when DesigningProtected Area Systems in Tropical Forests

Elizabeth L. Bennett

Introduction

People have inhabited tropical forests for some 40,000 years, and during that timehave developed intimate links with their environment -- links which encompass everyaspect of daily living, as well as belief systems and world views. A prime illustrationof the links between tropical forests and human communities is hunting, which is ofnutritional and economic importance to forest peoples, as well as being deeply boundinto many aspects of their culture. Yet in the rapidly changing environments oftropical forest countries, hunting in most areas today is no longer sustainable(Robinson and Bennett, 2000a). This has major implications for the conservation ofbiodiversity in protected areas, and for the health and well-being of associated humancommunities. This paper reviews the issue of hunting in tropical forests today, andproposes ways to ensure that biodiversity in protected areas can be conserved, whilestill allowing rural peoples to meet their needs and aspirations.

Importance of Hunting to Tropical Forest Peoples

Hunting is of primary importance to tropical forest peoples. First, much of theirnutrition is derived from wild meat: in Latin America, ten indigenous groups consumean average of 59.6g of protein per person per day from wild meat, well above theminimum protein levels required for healthy subsistence (Townsend, 2000). In WestAfrica, 25% of people’s protein requirements are met by wild meat, and in Liberia,75% of the country’s meat is from wild animals (Anstey, 1991). In Sarawak, 67% ofthe meals of Kelabits contain wild meat, and it is their main source of protein (Bennettet al., 2000).

Wildlife is also of major economic benefit to tropical forest peoples: first because itprovides a supply of protein which would otherwise have to be reared or bought, andsecondly because it can provide a significant source of income, at least in the shortterm. In Kenya, each local hunter earns $275/year from selling wild meat, whenaverage local per capita income is $38/year (FitzGibbon et al., 2000). In the CentralAfrican Republic, snare hunters earn $9.30/week, where the average local wage is $2-13 (Noss, 2000). Wildlife is also important for cultural integrity. Throughout thetropics, animal trophies are widely used in personal adornment, and hunting isinextricably woven into the world view of many cultures (Bennett and Robinson,2000a).

Sustainability of Hunting in Tropical Forests Today

In spite of its importance to people, for many species, and in most areas, hunting intropical forests today is not sustainable. This is true even when considering hunting byindigenous peoples and in the absence of significant immigration; at nine such sitesacross Latin America, Africa and Asia, 40%, 68% and 71% of hunted species

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respectively are harvested unsustainably by local forest communities (data fromBennett and Robinson, in press). These not only comprise the large ungulates usuallythought of as “game animals”, but a very wide range of species, from primates tosmall birds (Bennett and Robinson, 2000a). On average, neotropical mammalpopulations are reduced by 80% under moderate hunting, and can be reduced by morethan 90% under heavy hunting (Redford, 1992). In Africa, subsistence huntingreduces duikers populations by about 43% (Hart, 2000; Noss, 2000), and in eight sitesacross Asia, hunting reduces large mammal densities by an average of 64% (Bennettand Robinson, in press).

In addition, sustained heavy hunting will extirpate vulnerable species, especiallylarge-bodied species with low intrinsic rates of natural increase. For example, in areashunted by the Huaorani in Ecuador, seven mammal species are not present in heavilyhunted areas, or 30.4% of the total large mammal fauna (Mena et al., 2000). InSarawak, all diurnal primates were locally extirpated in three out of four heavilyhunted sites surveyed, and barking deer in two of them (Bennett et al., 2000), and inSulawesi, babirusa and anoa are both suffering range reductions due to hunting(Alvard, 2000).

Ever since they inhabited tropical forests, people have hunted wildlife, so extantspecies must have been able to withstand such hunting. Many recent changes areresponsible for the widespread lack of sustainability today. These include(summarized from Bennett and Robinson, 2000b):

• loss of tropical forests, resulting in hunting being concentrated into a smaller totalarea

• increases in human population density, thereby increasing the number of huntersper unit area. This can be due to intrinsic increase, and also to immigration toforest areas

• increased sedentarism which focuses hunting in one location, and increasingreliance on swidden agriculture which leads to increased human populationdensities and increased market involvement, both of which decrease huntingsustainability

• breakdown in traditional hunting practices such as taboos against hunting certainspecies, systems of traditional hunting territories, and traditional hunting methodsand practices

• advances in hunting technology, especially the spread of shotguns and wire snares,which result in hunting being less discriminating and more efficient. Technologiesrequire money for purchase. This often comes from selling wildlife, therebyestablishing a spiral of increasing harvest rates

• increasing commercialisation of hunting, with the boundary between commercialand subsistence rarely being clear. Commercialization results in increased huntingintensity by local hunters, entrance of non-resident commercial hunters, increasedhunting of non-commercial species for local subsistence, increased consumptionby the wealthy, and debt peonage which requires continued hunting to offset debts

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• increased access to tropical forests through outboard motors, rural flights, and,especially, logging and other roads. These allow easy access of outsiders intoforests to hunt, or to traders who buy from local hunters. Harvest rates of localhunters rise as people hunt increasingly for sale: per capita harvest rates in localcommunities adjacent to logging roads in the Congo are three to six times higherthan in communities further from the roads, with up to 75% of the meat (byweight) being sold (Auzel and Wilkie, 2000). Roads also allow local people tobuy technology such as cartridges, snare wires, batteries, vehicles and fuel whichfacilitate indiscriminate hunting. The result is that roads frequently correlate withthe demise of wildlife populations -- irrespective of the legal protected status ofthe land. In North Sulawesi, the spread of a highway was correlated with the lossof certain species and greatly reduced populations of others. In Sarawak, ease ofaccess is directly and inversely correlated with the densities of primates, hornbillsand large ungulates in a forest, including in protected areas. There are someexceptions to this. In Latin America, where the preference is generally fordomestic meat over wild meat, road access can permit people to make that dietaryshift, and reduce their reliance on wild meat. And in the rare cases whereenforcement is both effective and strong, roads can increase the ability forpatrolling and enforcement

• local societies becoming increasingly involved in market economies whichchanges resource-use patterns, including hunting rates. In Latin America, beyonda certain point, increased income of consumers tends to decrease consumption ofwild meat as the preference is for domestic meat. In Africa and Asia, the oppositeis generally true: the preference for wild meat means that increased income leadsto increased demand for wildlife.

These effects combine in most tropical forests of the world to create the problem oflack of sustainability which we see today.

Protected Areas and Hunting Sustainability

Protected areas aim to conserve biodiversity, so in theory they should prevent itsextirpation as a result of over-hunting. Many protected areas undoubtedly reducehunting, by mitigating some of the above effects. Protected areas curtail the loss offorests, and prevent the building of roads inside forest blocks. Depending on the typeof protected area, its regulations and successful application of them, they can alsoreduce access to the forest by all hunters or by outside hunters, prevent commercialhunting, and limit the use of certain technologies.

Conversely, inappropriate developments around or in association with protected areascan exacerbate the problems of hunting. Development projects, even if intended toenhance park conservation, can act as magnets for migrants, thereby increasing thepopulation of potential hunters and land clearers (Brandon and Wells, 1992; Oates,1995, 1999). Such projects also often involve increased access, with all of its ensuinghunting problems. They may increase the income of local communities which, ifcontrols are not in place, can lead to increased use of technologies and higher huntingrates. Mulu National Park in Sarawak is a classic example of this: building of touristlodges, a hotel and an airstrip resulted in entire local communities moving closer tothe park headquarters area in search of jobs; simultaneously, hunting rates increased

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to the point that almost no large mammals and birds remain within a day’s walk of theheadquarters (Wildlife Conservation Society and Sarawak Forest Department, 1996).

Tropical forests are especially susceptible to over-hunting since productivity of hunted species is lowcompared to savannahs and grasslands; the biomass of large mammals is generally an order ofmagnitude less, and productivity also lower. The result is that each square kilometre of tropical forestcan only sustainably provide for the annual wild meat protein needs of a single person (Robinson andBennett, 2000b). Demand now exceeds this in many tropical forests, even if hunting is limited to localforest peoples. In Sarawak, for example, the number of local people with legal rights to hunt forsubsistence is 1.4 to 3.8 times the maximum sustainable level in all three of its largest protected areas(Sapuan et al., in press).

Loss of wildlife also threatens the wider conservation of protected areas, as crucialpollinators, dispersers and browsers are lost, thereby reducing species diversity, andcurbing the ability of the forest to maintain itself (Redford, 1992; Terborgh, 1992,1999; Wright et al., 2000).

A common view today is that protected areas can no longer be fortresses protectedagainst human use. However, as they increasingly become isolated islands in a sea ofother land use, it is unrealistic to expect perhaps 10 per cent of the total tropicallandscape to conserve all of its biodiversity, as well as to fulfil the needs of localhuman societies. Unsustainably high levels of hunting will result in neither aim beingmet. Biodiversity will decline, starting with the large animal species and spreadingthrough the ecosystem. Local people will be tied into a declining resource base; thelow levels of use required for sustainability will not be able to meet their basic needs,let alone their increasing aspirations in today’s changing world. Unless the biologicallimitations of tropical forest systems are accepted by planners and managers, themission of protected areas will continue to be muddled (Brandon and Wells, 1992;Brandon, 1998), and both local people and biodiversity will continue to lose.

Solutions

To ensure that biodiversity is conserved and local peoples can also meet their needsand aspirations in low productivity tropical forest systems, planning must no longer beat the level of protected areas, but at the landscape level.

If one aim of planning is the conservation of biodiversity, then large, strictly protected areas areessential, in which little or no hunting occurs, and where viable populations of all species can be fullyprotected. Even if some subsistence hunting is allowed, strict controls are essential. If the population ofhumans using the area for their protein starts to approach one person per square kilometre, huntingshould be focused only on the less vulnerable species (generally those with high reproductive rates),use of modern technologies must be limited, and alternative sources of protein and income sought.

Projects to provide such alternatives must also be planned extremely carefully so thatthey do indeed reduce hunting. Experience in Africa and Asia has shown thatprovision of alternatives alone does not reduce hunting (Oates, 1999; Bennett et al.,2000), and access and possible in-migration caused by such projects might exacerbateit (Brandon, 1998). The link between development of alternatives and reduction inhunting must be obvious and strong, therefore, with education programmes andincentives in place, together with systems to enforce anti-hunting agreements andregulations (van Schaik and Kramer, 1997; Oates, 1999). An essential part of anyprogramme is monitoring of wildlife populations and hunting levels, to ensure that the

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conservation goals are being met, and the results fed back into the decision-makingprocess to allow adaptive management to occur (Margoluis and Salafsky, 1998;Bodmer and Puertas, 2000).

To allow resource extraction by local communities (and possibly others), strictprotected areas should be surrounded by extractive reserves, where wildlife and otherrenewable resources can be harvested sustainably. The strict protected areas will actas “sources” of wildlife to allow sustainable hunting in the contiguous extractivereserves (Pulliam, 1988; Hill and Padwe, 2000). The extractive reserves must be inaddition to the strict protected areas, not a part of them -- even if 10 per cent of acountry’s land is under strict protection, up to 50 per cent of its biodiversity might belost (Soulé and Sanjayan, 1998), so any activities in the strict protected areas shouldbe minimized. Therefore, planners should aim to ensure that further areas of thecountry are protected as extractive reserves, to allow a sustainable supply of forestproducts, including wildlife. The exact size of such extractive reserves is difficult todetermine, and will depend on local needs, economies, and local and national policies.They should be large enough so that, together with the protected areas, viablepopulations of wide-ranging, landscape species can survive, and the level of resourceextraction needed by local communities can be sustainable. Again, strict monitoring isneeded to ensure that these aims are being met.

Within the complex of strictly protected and extractive reserves, rights to hunt mustbe clearly defined, and a system to enforce regulations in place and functioning. Thisis essential both to prevent over-exploitation by outsiders, and also, by doing that, tovest the local communities in the process. Handing over all control to thecommunities often results in the conservation aim being lost and the area being over-exploited (e.g. Redford, 1989; Oates, 1999). Instead, a system of co-managementbetween local communities and technical advisors can ensure that the localcommunities have a major input into decision making and management, and a majorshare of the benefits (Wells and Brandon, 1992; Weber, 1995), while also allowingthe conservation aims and legal regulations to be fulfilled (Bodmer and Puertas, 2000;Tisen and Bennett, this conference).

Given the low productivity of tropical forests, however, even such a system of strictlyprotected areas and extractive reserves is unlikely to meet even the basic needs ofgrowing human populations in tropical forest countries. For example, the main sourceof protein in Bioko, Equatorial Guinea, is wild meat. The human population requiresmore than 4 million kg of meat/year to fulfil its protein needs, yet the maximumsustainable harvest of wildlife from all of the island’s forests is only 23,000 kg peryear, a mere 0.575% of that required (Fa, 2000). Even though an extreme example,increasing populations and decreasing forest areas mean that this is likely to be thefuture pattern in many areas. And this is only the amount required to fulfil basicneeds; it does not consider surpluses essential to allow peoples’ higher aspirations tobe met in rapidly developing economies and changing worlds. Hence, forest areasmust be complimented by non-forest, high productivity areas to produce food andwealth. Planners at all levels should be looking towards a sustainable landscape(Robinson, 1994), with a mosaic of strictly protected areas, extractive reserves, andintensive production areas (both agriculture and industry). Only then will tropicalforest biodiversity be conserved, and peoples’ needs and aspirations be met.

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Acknowledgements

The ideas in this paper have evolved throughout a long and productive collaborationwith John G. Robinson, which is greatly appreciated. Thanks also to Kent H. Redfordfor his comments on an earlier draft.

References

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Anstey, S. (1991) Wildlife Utilization in Liberia . Gland, Switzerland: World Wide Fund for Nature andFDA Wildlife Survey.

Auzel, P. and Wilkie, D.S. (2000). Wildlife use in northern Congo: hunting in a commercial loggingconcession. In J.G. Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests,pp. 413-426. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bennett, E.L., Nyaoi, A.J. and Sompud, J. (2000). Saving Borneo’s bacon: the sustainability of huntingin Sarawak and Sabah. In J.G. Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in TropicalForests, pp. 305-324. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bennett, E.L. and Robinson, J.G. (2000a). Hunting for the Snark. In J.G. Robinson and E.L. Bennett(eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp. 1-9. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bennett, E.L. and Robinson, J.G. (2000b). Hunting for sustainability: the start of a synthesis. In J.G.Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp. 499-519. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

Bennett, E.L. and Robinson, J.G. (in press). Hunting of Wildlife in Tropical Forests: Implications forBiodiversity and Forest Peoples. Washington DC: Global Environment Division, The World Bank.

Bodmer, R. and Puertas, P.E. (2000). Community-based co-management of wildlife in the PeruvianAmazon. In J.G. Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp.395-409. New York: Columbia University Press.

Brandon, K. (1998). Perils to parks: the social context of threats. In K. Brandon, K.H. Redford and S.E.Sanderson (eds.), Parks in Peril: People, Politics and Protected Areas, pp. 415-439. Washington DC:The Nature Conservancy and Island Press.

Brandon, K. and Wells, M. (1992). Planning for people and parks: design dilemmas. WorldDevelopment, 20 (4), 557-570.

Fa, J.E. (2000) Hunted animals in Bioko Island, West Africa: sustainability and future. In J.G.Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp. 168-198. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

FitzGibbon, C.D., Mogaka, H. and Fanshawe, J.H. (2000) Threatened mammals, subsistenceharvesting, and high human population densities: a recipe for disaster? In J.G. Robinson and E.L.Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp. 154-167. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Hart, J.A. (2000) Impact and sustainability of indigenous hunting in the Ituri Forest, Congo-Zaire: acomparison of unhunted and hunted duiker populations. In J.G. Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.),Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp. 106-153. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Hill, K. and Padwe, J. (2000) Sustainability of Aché hunting in the Mbaracayu Reserve, Paraguay. InJ.G. Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp. 79-105. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

Margoluis, R. and Salafsky, N. (1998) Measures of Success: Designing, Managing, and MonitoringConservation and Development Projects. Washington DC: Island Press.

Mena, P.V., Stallings, J.R., Regalado, J.B. and Cueva, R.L. (2000) The sustainability of huntingpractices by the Huaorani. In J.G. Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability inTropical Forests, pp. 57-78. New York: Columbia University Press.

Noss, A. (2000). Cable snares and nets in the Central African Republic. In J.G. Robinson and E.L.Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp. 282-304. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

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Oates, J.F. (1999) Myth and Reality in the Rain Forest. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California:University of California Press.

Pulliam, H.R. (1988). Sources, sinks, and population regulation. Am. Naturalist, 132, 652-661.

Redford, K.H. (1989) Monte Pascoal -- indigenous rights and conservation in conflict. Oryx, 23, 33-36.

Redford, K.H. (1992). The empty forest. BioScience, 42, 412-422.

Robinson, J.G. (1994). Carving up tomorrow’s planet. Int. Wildlife , 24, 30-37.

Robinson, J.G. and Bennett, E.L. (2000a) Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests. New York:Columbia University Press.

Robinson, J.G. and Bennett, E.L. (2000b). Carrying capacity limits to sustainable hunting in tropicalforests. In J.G. Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp.13-30. New York: Columbia University Press.

Sapuan Haji Ahmad, Tisen, O.B. and Bennett, E.L. (in press). Wildlife conservation and localcommunities in Sarawak. Hornbill, 3.

Soulé, M.E. and Sanjayan, M.A. (1998) Conservation targets: do they help? Science, 279, 2060-2061.

Terborgh, J. (1992) Maintenance of diversity in tropical forests. Biotropica, 24, 283-292.

Terborgh, J. (1999) Requiem for Nature. Washington DC: Island Press.

Townsend, W.R. (2000) The sustainability of hunting by the Sirionó Indians of Bolivia. In J.G.Robinson and E.L. Bennett (eds.), Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests, pp. 267-281. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

van Schaik, C.P. and Kramer, R.A. (1997) Toward a new protection paradigm. In R. Kramer, C. vanSchaik and J. Johnson (eds.), Last Stand: Protected Areas and the Defense of Tropical Biodiversity, pp.212-228.New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Weber, W. (1995) Monitoring awareness and attitude in conservation education: the mountain gorillaproject in Rwanda. In Conserving Wildlife: International Education and Communication Approaches,pp. 28-48. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wells, M. and Brandon, K. (1992) People and Parks: Linking Protected Area Management and LocalCommunities. Washington DC: The World Bank.

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Wildlife Conservation Society and Sarawak Forest Department (1996). A Master Plan for Wildlife inSarawak . Kuching, Sarawak: Wildlife Conservation Society and Sarawak Forest Department.

Wright, S.J., Zeballos, H., Domínguez, I., Gallardo, M.M., Moreno, M.C. and Ibáñez, R. (2000)Poachers alter mammal abundance, seed dispersal, and seed predation in a neotropical forest. Cons.Biol., 14(1), 227-239.

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ANGAP's Approach to a Sustainable Future

Antoine Leclerc and Tiana Razafimahatratra1

AbstractLong term sustainability for a protected area system calls for soundinstitutional stability and adequate finances. PA organizations, in bothdeveloping countries and so called “industrialized countries”, faceincreasingly stiff competition for securing and sustaining the significanthuman and financial resources required for long term effectivemanagement. In developing countries, the expectation is that a sizeableportion of the resources required will come from bilateral or multilateraldonors. Donors have grown increasingly weary of poorly plannedendeavours, often based on good faith, theory and principles more than onsound business sense. All in all, seeking means and systems forsustainable financing is more and more like going to the bank, so to speak.The "Association Nationale pour la Gestion des Aires Protégées" (ANGAP)aims to adapt successfully to this evolving organizational realm. In itsquest for institutional and financial sustainability, ANGAP has purposelychosen a business-like approach, which somewhat mimics that of anenterprise setting itself up for refinancing or for going public. Thispaper explains this choice and describes the various steps for thisrigorous approach to developing a convincing “business case”:

• confirmation of the mandate and sound foundation for the institution, by setting up animproved legal framework

• clear strategic direction and objectives, through the development of a sound systemmanagement plan

• re-engineering as required, dictated by an organizational review based on the findings of thesystem management plan

• A business plan based on all of the above, including a professional reading of true fixed costs,marketing opportunities, and estimate of potential revenues.

Antoine Leclerc Senior Technical Advisor, ANGAP c/o Madagascar Programme OfficeP.O. Box 738Antananarivo 101MADAGASCARemail: aleclerc@online.mg

1 Tiana Razafimahatrtra

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Madagascar Programme Officeemail:Trazafimahatratra@wwfnet.org

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ANGAP's Approach to a Sustainable Future

Antoine Leclerc and Tiana Razafimahatratra

The ANGAP Context

Institutional Context

ANGAP was created in 1991 to coordinate the activities of NGOs contracted to manage existing naturereserves and national parks in Madagascar at a national level.

The organization was given a four-pronged mission: conservation, ecotourism, regional development,and environmental education. Since its creation, ecotourism has been the main preoccupation ofANGAP. This occurred because the government of Madagascar considers national protected areas tobe the backbone of tourism development for the country, and because the Association had been misledinto believing that ecotourism would be its cash cow.

Six years later, in 1997, the government of Madagascar has modified the core mandate of ANGAP. Itbecame the direct operator of the national system of protected areas, composed of forty-seven parksand reserves. Fifteen of these are major operational parks. When the mandate was changed, ANGAPand its partners saw the need for the organization to consolidate its legal foundation, and to modernizeits management framework. This was soon translated into a plan to decentralize ANGAP'sadministration and to renew the overall legal framework for the creation and the management ofprotected areas in the country. Implementation started shortly thereafter and gained significantmomentum with the appointment of a new team of senior managers, during the second half of 1998.

Unfortunately, since 1997, ANGAP had been operating under a serious misunderstanding over ablanket funding arrangement with the donors. This multi-donor agreement, negotiated in 1995, coversall components of Madagascar's National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP). Repeated notificationsby the donors, in 1998 and in 1999, made it clear that there was indeed confusion about the availabilityof funds that were made available to ANGAP. Madagascar was informed at the time that the envelopewas not as had been understood, and that it was not to be expanded. Once again, ANGAP had todemonstrate its capacity for adaptation.

Organizational Culture

ANGAP is an important organization. It is accountable for the management of a sizeable anddiversified system of protected areas inherited partly from a rather distant past, and more recently frommajor NGOs and the unfailing generosity and support of wealthy donors.

On the one hand, the unique biological diversity of the island easily justifies the size and complexity ofthe system. However, such a system is costly to develop and expensive to operate. On the other hand,Madagascar is one of the least developed countries in the world. The possibility that it may achieveenough economic growth in the short and medium term to cover the costs of managing its system ofprotected areas is at best minimal. Hence, ANGAP, like so many other national conservation agenciesin developing countries, must put its faith in continued international support.

To its credit, ANGAP already has a solid base which gives it potential for achieving some degree ofsustainability. Its notable physical and human resource assets, with their related high costs foradministration and maintenance, can no doubt be deemed a financial liability. Conversely, they can bethought of as a unique and value-added competitive advantage enabling it to build a modern, capable,and dynamic organization capable of effectively managing Madagascar's system of protected areas fortomorrow's generations.

This potential is leveraged by ANGAP's proven capacity to adapt steadily. As indicated above, it hasshown that its management team has a remarkable ability to manage a wide range of challenges at thesame time. The financial and strategic planning events mentioned above would likely have proven tobe an insurmountable challenge for other young organizations. On the contrary, it has resulted in a

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burgeoning organizational culture where healthy questioning and adaptive management is fostered.For this reason, ANGAP offers a unique window of opportunity for implementing a well-structuredplan of action aimed at guaranteeing its institutional and financial sustainability.

The Choice of Approach for Sustainability

In many cases, governmental and para-governmental organizations have ahard time adapting to significantly different models of strategic andoperational thinking, because of their long-standing organizational cultureand traditional reluctance to change. It has proven difficult, forexample, to introduce the notions of rigorous financial management and ofmodern marketing in most essentially conservation-oriented PAorganizations.

This is not the case for ANGAP. It reacted swiftly to the 1998 clarification by the donors, aboutfunding issues, by committing to the development in the short term of a system plan and of a businessplan. These, along with a new protected areas act, the soon-to-be-approved COAP (Code des AiresProtégées), are considered the essential building blocks of a sustainable future for the organization.This initial strategic approach has since been complemented by the addition of related managementinitiatives.

The overall approach has definitely been inspired by private sector practices. This was done for tworeasons. Firstly, ANGAP concedes that governmental and para-governmental organizations still havemuch to learn from the private sector concerning strategic processes for "business" development.Secondly, ANGAP has proven its capacity to apply innovative thinking, and thus considers itselfcapable of adapting and applying such processes for its own needs. This corporate characteristic isessential for the type of changes envisaged.

The Steps to Sustainability

Five essential steps constitute the overall process undertaken by ANGAP: a) reinforcing the legalfoundation; b) developing a system plan; c) reviewing and, as required, reengineering the organization;d) developing a business plan focused on institutional and financial sustainability; and e) designing asustainable finance programme.

The Legal Foundation

ANGAP's current enabling legal framework, dating back to a 1990 agreement with the Ministère de laProtection Animale et des Eaux et Forêts, may have been considered somehow adequate at the time,since most park operation responsibilities were delegated to NGOs under contract. ANGAP had acoordination and control role only, for the application of the agreements.

However, since ANGAP assumed direct responsibility for a large number of protected areas, themanagement, legislative, and policy frameworks in place had not been amended to reflect this newreality and its resulting challenges. This has now been resolved with the recent development of COAP,the protected areas codes. The proposed code includes provisions for clearly identifying the"institution" accountable for the management of Madagascar's protected areas. It sets the guidingprinciples for this management, including provisions for law enforcement, as well as general strategiesfor protected areas related research, conservation, ecotourism, and environmental education.Furthermore, the Code promotes partnerships and the extensive involvement of local communities forPA management. Finally, it introduces a new concept for protected areas in Madagascar: the creationof protected areas by other levels of government and by civil society.

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Government will consider the proposed Code in the next few months, for later enactment byParliament. ANGAP, which is expected to be formally confirmed as the "institution" made responsiblefor the management of protected areas in Madagascar, will then be assured of a solid legal foundationfrom which to act. Based on the observation that private sector enterprises retain the best corporatelawyers that they can afford, to ensure that they always stand on solid legal ground, ANGAP felt theneed for such security. It must have the comfort of a legal framework that will enable it to pursue allappropriate initiatives towards institutional and financial effectiveness and sustainability.

The System Plan

The COAP will not, however, give ANGAP the strategic directions it needs in order to chart specificcourses of action for the short and the medium term.

When, in 1998, ANGAP made its commitment to formally plan for sustainability, it clearly stated thatit would do so based on a clear vision of its future. ANGAP's executives agreed at the time that thisvision would be defined through system planning, a proven process that has gained notable recognitionand credibility internationally, both with PA professionals, leading NGOs, and the donor community.

A detailed programme to develop a system plan was approved by ANGAP in early 1999. The plan isnow in its final phase of editing before submission to the Malagasy Department of the Environment forapproval. It defines the mosaic of protected areas identified for an appropriate representation ofMadagascar's complex and unique biodiversity. It also details the technical and scientific justificationfor the choices made.

In addition, the plan specifies the essential components of ANGAP's functional and operationalframeworks, sets management priorities for each, and ties these to the specific environmental andsocio-cultural contexts of each particular PA and administrative region. With due consideration for thefact that Madagascar is a vast and diversified country, the organization feels that the PAs under itsjurisdiction will respond better to the expectations of the nation if specific courses of action reflectregional diversity. Overall, ANGAP expects its comprehensive system planning exercise to provide aclear detailed vision for the coming years, and the key basic information required for proper "businessplanning".

The Organizational Review

One more strategic step is required, however, before the business planning phase is initiated.

In the light of the 1997-98 thrust for decentralization urged by ANGAP's supporting organizations, andbased on a comprehensive programme review by an external consultant at that time, ANGAP's Boardof Directors approved revised functional and structural organization charts in early 1999.

Since then, a number of important developments have changed ANGAP's landscape, including:

• the COAP, which will enable the organization to set up its own law enforcement programme• the 1998-99 funding changes at the NEAP level, and the resulting acute awareness for the need to

manage more effectively• the Plan de Gestion du Réseau des Aires Protégées (GRAP), with its in-depth review of

management direction for the organization, and expected significant adjustments to priorities in thefields of conservation, of ecotourism, and of communications, including nature interpretation andenvironmental education

• the revised overall management system, financial management included, that focuses on themanagers' essential responsibility for accountable planning, direction and control, within thecontext of a pre-set, carefully monitored, management cycle.

Based on these four points, ANGAP acknowledges that there may be a need for corporate structuraladjustments, in order to reflect better its evolving context for development and operations. It hastherefore put in place an organizational review that will assess its ability to implement the newdirections and thrusts defined through the process described above. This review, which is alreadyunder way, will likely result in changes being made to the current functional and structural order andsystems at ANGAP.

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The thrust for a renewed ANGAP also encompasses initiatives that could be qualified as"accompanying measures". These have been designed to improve ANGAP's corporate image andenhance its credibility, both nationally and internationally.

The private sector places a lot of importance on the way in which it is perceived by its target markets,by its partners and by the business community in general. Rightly so. Impressions conveyed by aname or by an image are important to the public. Proven capacity and acknowledged soundmanagement practices are, as much as profit margins, key credibility factors for the businesscommunity.

ANGAP believes that this also applies to its own "line of business". It needs strong support from all itsinfluential partners in order to achieve sustainability, in the same way that private enterprises needfaithful clients and a reliable line of credit. As a result, the organization has already started to manageits image so that supporters have a consistent and positive perception of its capability andprofessionalism, in the fields of science, conservation, and management:

• ANGAP's participation in international conferences has expanded in order to increase theawareness and appreciation of the organization for its work, and for the unique biodiversity it hasthe mandate to preserve

• the Association plans to have a new name shortly, more explicit of its Malagasy identity, and anew attractive logo more illustrative of its role

• a project is being developed for the production of high quality promotional material• a strategic marketing plan is envisaged as a means of identifying and optimizing avenues and

measures for increased visibility, impact, and revenues.• ANGAP is making these specific initiatives well known to all of those who are likely to affect its futuresustainability.

Most importantly, the organization will ensure that its promises are fulfilled, that the new image itconveys is true to reality, and that it has the reliable systems and the qualified people required foroptimized performance. Training and capacity building are priorities, as much as sound overallmanagement. Also, the word is out that ANGAP is giving its conservation mandate, and the quality ofscience, higher and more visible priority.

The Business Plan

In order to avoid any perception that ANGAP's thrust towards sustainability implies inappropriatecommercial aspirations or practices, the organization has elected to call its business plan "Plan depérennisation", i.e. plan for sustainability. The plan is scheduled for development in the second part ofthe year 2000.

Based on the new requirements dictated by the COAP, by the system plan, and by the impact of theorganizational review, the Plan de pérennisation will, in much more detailed and practical terms thanthe system plan itself:

• propose precise and detailed management directions for ANGAP• identify the systems and resources required in order to achieve optimized outputs, effectiveness

and impact• acknowledge potential limitations to the organization's expected capacity to deliver, and,

accordingly, submit relevant priorities for development and operations, with an analysis of relatedrisks and planned performance

• provide costing and potential revenue information for a tiered range of delivery options, based onthe directions, priorities, and perceived risks referred to above

• propose resulting options for resource allocation, based on forecasted costs and revenues.

This Plan de pérennisation will thus define the management actions required to implement thedecisions resulting from the system plan and of the organizational review. Most importantly, it willalso provide the detailed foundation required for completing the final phase of ANGAP's electedstrategy for ensuring its sustainable future: the development of a financial sustainability programme.

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The Sustainable Funding Programme

Based on the resource requirements defined in the business planning exercise, the sustainable fundingprogramme will outline where the funds required might come from, and how they ought to begenerated.

It will detail the integrated choice of funding sources and mechanisms deemed appropriate followingdiscussions with the government, with the donors, and with actual and potential partners. All provenmechanisms and instruments will have been probed, from trust funds to donations, along with targetedtaxes, user fees, revenues from partnerships and commercial operations, and so on.

The sustainable funding programme will also dictate the management and financial administrationframeworks essentially required for ensuring that it can be implemented with effectiveness, efficiency,transparency, probity and reliability.

Conclusion

No strategic process is foolproof. Experience has shown that the development of a national legalframework and of a system plan for PAs can have a significant impact on land use, ownership, control,and administration. Consequently, projects of this nature carry much social and political sensitivity.

ANGAP has no guarantee that its financial and institutional sustainability strategies will succeed asplanned. Significant delays already affect the approval of the COAP. Also, the organization is wellaware that, notwithstanding extensive consultation during its development phase, the system plan maystill have to face hurdles. Finally, there are no guarantees that donors and partners will buy into theresults of the business plan process.

However, ANGAP is convinced that it has chosen the right path. Already, its progress in implementingthe early phases of the strategy is paying off. The organization's senior managers’ benefit from betterstrategic information and arguments for making decisions and for discussing with partners. Earlyresults of the process have boosted ANGAP's credibility and given it access to increased support andcomplementary funding for training and for management improvement. Moreover, donorrepresentatives have shown appreciation for the initiatives planned and for progress to date, and havesent clear signals that these may have a notable impact on their willingness to support ANGAP's thrustsfor sizeable sustainable funding in the future.

The organization remains well aware, however, that gains are fragile, and considers its approach to beiterative by nature. At any point, results from one phase may impact significantly on the results of theprevious one, and force a review of earlier conclusions and decisions. This is the nature of adaptivemanagement. It is accepted as unavoidable and constructive.

ANGAP is proud to have been given the opportunity to share this experience with colleagues fromother organizations and countries.

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Real World Conservation: Combining Biological, Economic andSocial Criteria in Planning a National System of Forest NatureReserves for Uganda

Peter C Howard

AbstractUganda is one of Africa’s most biologically diverse countries, and has a system of protected areascovering 33,000km2 (14% of the country’s area). These include 713 forest reserves, where humansettlement, cultivation and livestock are excluded, but timber and other renewable resources can beharvested. In the late 1980s the Ugandan government undertook to establish 20% of the forest reserveland as strict nature reserves. We describe the procedure used to select these new nature reserves, basedon a five-year, US$ one million programme of biodiversity and resource assessment. We scored andranked the various forests against relevant site selection criteria, firstly using biological criteria, thenmodifying the approach to take into account opportunity costs and potential land-use conflicts. Theresulting network of 39 new nature reserves, together with the country’s national parks, would protect99% of Uganda’s species, whilst minimizing the economic and social costs involved.

Peter HowardDirector, Africa ProgrammeWildlife Conservation Society185th St and Southern BoulevardBronx NY 10460UNITED STATESemail: phoward@wcs.org

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Real World Conservation: Combining Biological, Economic andSocial Criteria in Planning a National System of Forest NatureReserves for Uganda

Peter C Howard

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this paper is to describe an approach used to plan a nature reserve system in Uganda,one of the most biologically diverse countries of Africa. The paper is based on a recent publication inConservation Biology (Howard et al., 2000). I illustrate how the principles of conservation biologycan be applied to such a reserve selection process, and specifically how the biologically idealconfiguration of reserves can be modified to incorporate consideration of alternative land-use optionsin reserve network design. I also show that although it might be theoretically desirable to create thelargest possible reserves in each of Uganda’s major vegetation types, a fully representative network ofreserves requires the inclusion of a relatively large number of widely scattered (smaller) sites. Manysites are unique in their biological constituents, and cannot be substituted.

Uganda’s protected areas cover about 33,000km2, or 14% of the country’s area, and fall into threecategories: national parks, wildlife (formerly game) reserves and forest reserves (IUCN, 1992).Legally, nobody is allowed to reside in, cultivate or graze livestock in any of these areas, although, inpractice, violations are widespread. The national parks and wildlife reserves comprise a few, generallylarge areas (20 sites, averaging 1,074km2), whereas forest reserves are much more numerous, oftenquite small and widely dispersed (710 sites, averaging 21km2). Forest reserves make up a little lessthan half the total area protected, and occur in all areas of the country encompassing a wide range offorest, savannah and other vegetation types. They are often surrounded by rural communities, and arerequired to satisfy the subsistence needs of local people for forest products (e.g. building poles,firewood) as well as any permitted commercial use (e.g. timber harvesting), and environmentalprotection functions (Hamilton, 1984; Howard, 1991).

As a result of increasing awareness of the biodiversity and other environmental values of Uganda’sforests during the late 1980s, a policy decision was taken to designate 20% of the forest reserve land(existing in 1988) as strict nature reserves, 30% as low-impact ‘buffer zones’, and the remaining 50%as areas managed primarily for the sustained supply of forest products, particularly tropical hardwoods.In principle, the idea was that each forest should be zoned, with a totally protected core nature reserve,surrounded by a ‘buffer zone’ with timber production and community-use zones in the peripheral areasof each forest. The main aims of establishing the new nature reserves are to ensure (a) that viableexamples of undisturbed ecological communities, populations of all species, and genetic resources aremaintained in perpetuity, and (b) that the regenerative capacity of adjacent timber-producing areas ofthe main production forests is enhanced through the establishment of a nearby reservoir of seedmaterial, dispersal agents and ecological services.

METHODS

Our nature reserve planning procedure involved four principal stages (Figure 1), starting with theidentification of a limited number of forest reserves as ‘candidates’ for possible nature reserveestablishment. These forests became the focus of detailed biodiversity and resource assessment workduring the second stage, while the third stage involved analysis of field data and selection of forests fornature reserve establishment. Finally, we decided on the allocation of land to nature reserves and othermanagement zones within each of the selected forests.

Stage One: Identification of Candidate Forests

The aim of the first stage was to short-list a limited number of candidate forests from which to selectnature reserve sites. This involved eliminating a large number of small forests representing widespreadvegetation types for further consideration. We decided to include as candidate forests (a) all forestreserves exceeding 50km2 (because these are most likely to sustain viable populations of the widest

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range of species in the long term) and (b) additional smaller reserves representing vegetation types notfound elsewhere in the protected area system, or considered especially important from an internationalperspective.

The identification of candidate forests therefore involved examination of the representation of 86vegetation sub-types in each of Uganda’s protected areas (i.e. Gap Analysis; Scott et al., 1993). Weplotted protected area boundaries on vegetation maps at a scale of 1:500,000, and used a transparentgrid overlay to assess the extent of each vegetation sub-type within each protected area by countinggrid squares. Initially we did this for all national parks, wildlife reserves, and the largest forest reserves(53 reserves exceeding 50km2). Then we examined these results, before consulting the maps again todetermine where vegetation sub-types missing from these protected areas were represented in any ofthe (657) smaller forest reserves. These smaller reserves were then added to the list of candidateforests.

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Stage OneIdentification Of Candidate Forests

tt

Stage TwoBiological Inventories And Resource Assessment

tt

Stage ThreeData Analysis And Site Selection

tStep 1

Evaluate each forest’sbiodiversity importance

tStep 2

Evaluate each forest’snature reserve suitability

tStep 3

Examine complementaritybetween sites

tStep 4

Initial site selectiont

Step 5Evaluate potential alternatives

and make final selection

tt

Stage FourAllocation of Management Zones

Within Each Selected Forest

Fig. 1 Nature Reserve site selection and planning procedure

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Stage Two: Biological Inventories and Resource Assessment

The most intensive phase of the work involved a major programme of biological inventory and otherresource assessment of all candidate forests, as a more refined basis for nature reserve site selection.We used a species-based approach, involving selected indicator groups. These were chosen on the basisof practical as well as biological criteria, including ease of sampling and the availability of resources(e.g. identification guides, reference collections) necessary for their study. We chose plants and animalsthat are as taxonomically different as possible, including representatives from flying and non-flyinggroups, vertebrates and invertebrates. Thus we selected five species indicator groups: woody plants,five families of small mammals (Cricetidae, Gerbillidae, Muridae, Myoxidae, Soricidae), birds,butterflies and two families of large moths (Saturniidae, Sphingidae).

Four inventory teams (each with five to six members) carried out the fieldwork in 64 forests betweenMay 1992 and March 1995. The objective for each team was to sample as many indicator taxa aspossible, exploring the full range of habitats within each forest reserve. Field time was allocated inproportion to the size of each reserve and strict field recording procedures were maintained to trackspecies accumulation rates. This facilitated later comparison between sites using observed speciestotals for given levels of sampling (Prendergast et al., 1993). Specific field sampling techniques foreach of the five indicator groups were based on current recognized methods, described elsewhere(Howard & Davenport, 1996).

Stage Three: Data Analysis and Site Selection

Species lists generated by the fieldwork were used initially to compare and rank sites in terms of theirbiodiversity values. This provided a basis for nature reserve site selection and development of aprocedure to allocate forest land to different uses.

Step 1: Evaluation of biodiversity importance

We first derived a biodiversity importance score for each forest from consideration of species richness,and the rarity value of the species represented. Each of the five indicator groups was first consideredalone, before calculating combined ‘average’ scores for species richness and rarity value for each site. Forspecies richness we used a measure of the relative number of species per unit area (Prendergast et al.,1993). For rarity value we calculated a score for each species based on the number of Ugandan recordsfor that species and its Africa-wide distribution. Scores for the top ten sites are given for illustrativepurposes in Table 1.

Table 1. Ranking of top ten Ugandan forests for species richness,rarity value and biodiversity importance

Species Richness Rarity Value Overall BiodiversityImportance

Forest Score Forest Score Forest ScoreRank (max. 10) (max. 10) (max. 20)

1 Kasyoha-Kitomi

8.3 Echuya 9.7 Bwindi 16.6

2 Bwindi 8.2 Rwenzori 8.8 Kasyoha-Kitomi

15.6

3 Budongo 7.7 Mt Moroto 8.5 Budongo 15.4

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4 Kalinzu-Mara' 7.6 Bwindi 8.4 Kalinzu-Mara' 14.85 Kibale 7.6 Mafuga 8.1 Mt Moroto 14.76 Mt Kadam 7.6 Mt Elgon 8 Rwenzori 14.57 Mpanga 7.6 Budongo 7.7 Kibale 14.58 West Bugwe 7.5 Semliki 7.7 Semliki 14.49 Mpigi 7.5 Kasyoha-

Kitomi7.3 Echuya 14.3

10 Kabuika 7.4 Kalinzu-Mara' 7.2 Otzi 14.1

Step 2: Evaluation of ‘nature reserve suitability’

Nature reserves and other conservation areas are most likely to be maintained in the long term if theyprovide additional benefits which complement their role in biodiversity conservation and are located inareas with little or no potential for alternative consumptive uses such as timber production orcommunity use. The suitability of any particular forest as a conservation area can thus be evaluated interms of its biodiversity value and potential for complementary uses, offset against its potential foralternative uses. Thus a biologically important area encompassing the highest parts of a mountainrange with important watershed functions and high potential for recreational use is likely to beparticularly suitable as a conservation area, especially when it is poorly stocked with timber,inaccessible, and surrounded by sparsely populated communal lands.

We used nature reserve suitability scores as a means of (a) ensuring that ‘least cost’ (suitable) naturereserve options were taken in preference to more ‘expensive’ alternatives (even though these may bemore efficient in terms of the number of sites required to achieve biodiversity conservation objectives),and (b) adjusting the areas to be dedicated to conservation uses within individual sites (in stage four,below).

Step 2 of our data analysis and site selection procedure involved scoring nature reserve suitability foreach site, as conservation value minus alternative-use potential. Conservation value was taken as thesum of biodiversity importance (described above) and potential for compatible non-consumptive uses(i.e. tourism, watershed protection, education and research). Alternative-use potential was taken as thesum of a forest’s commercial forestry potential and the potential for community use of its resources.Details of the derivation of these scores are provided in Forest Department, 1999 and Howard et al.,2000. Scores for the top ten sites are given for illustrative purposes in Table 2.

Table 2. Ranking of top ten Ugandan forests for nature reserve suitability

Biodiversity Non-consumptive Timber Community- NatureRank Forest importance use potential use Reserve

(max. 20) (max. 10) (max. 20) (max. 20) Suitability

1 Mt Moroto 14.7 7 0.6 0.5 20.62 Mt Kadam 14.1 5 0.6 0.5 183 Mt Napak 13.2 4 1.6 0.2 15.44 Morongole 13.2 4 0.6 1.2 15.45 Timu 12.1 2 0 0.5 13.66 Nyangea-

Napore13.4 4 4 0.2 13.2

7 Ogili 13.1 2 0 2.2 12.98 Agoro-Agu 12.8 4 3.6 0.8 12.49 Rom 12.2 3 3.6 0.2 11.4

10 Lwala 12.1 2 1.6 1.5 11

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Step 3: Complementarity analysis

Although it is useful to evaluate sites for biodiversity importance and nature reserve suitability, siteselection based solely on such criteria is likely to be inefficient because several of the more biologicallyimportant or suitable sites may be similar. Protecting several examples of a particular community,habitat, or suite of species may be difficult to justify if others remain unprotected. For this reason, weconstructed complementarity tables based on the species records, starting with the richest site, followedby the one which complemented it best by adding the most species not already represented in the firstsite. We built up a list of sites in this way, each one adding to the total list of species represented, untilthe full complement of species known from all Uganda’s protected areas was included. This listrepresents the ‘minimum critical set’ of sites that would be required to represent all species at leastonce. The procedure has been used widely elsewhere (Vane-Wright et al., 1991; Pressey et al., 1993,1994; Johnson, 1995).

We combined data for the five indicator groups in the complementarity analysis as an average of thepercentage of plants added by each forest and the percentage of animals. The animals’ complementwas derived by averaging the complements added for each of the four animal groups, expressed inpercentage terms. Thus, in the overall assessment, 50% of the recorded complement of speciescontributed by each forest is attributable to its trees and shrubs, whereas 12.5% is contributed by eachof the animal groups (butterflies, birds, mammals, and moths). Thus in our initial complementarityanalysis, we found that 88% of Uganda’s biodiversity was accounted for by the top ten sites (Table 3).

Table 3 Complementarity table showing the cumulative percentage ofUganda’s biodiversity contributed by each of the top ten sites

Trees Fauna CombinedSite name (Total %) (Total %) Total %

Budongo 47 40 44Queen Elizabeth NP 56 50 53Bwindi 65 62 63Kidepo Valley NP 69 68 69Semliki 71 76 74Moroto 75 81 78Mt. Elgon 79 83 81Otzi 83 85 84Rwenzori 85 88 86Kasyoha-Kitomi 87 89 88

In a significant departure from the normal complementarity analysis procedure we then carried out aseries of further analyses to explore different protected area system configurations. The normalprocedure (adding sites to maximize the number of species represented at each stage) produces themost ‘efficient’ system, accounting for the greatest number of species in the fewest possible sites.However, we recognized that it may be preferable from an economic, social or political perspective toadopt a less efficient system, involving a selection of a greater number of sites, if these sites can beselected to minimize potential land-use conflicts. We therefore began our next complementarityanalysis by considering areas designated as national parks at the top of the table, followed by steepmountain catchment reserves. Biodiversity within these areas can be considered preferentiallyprotected, because the necessary political decisions and institutional mechanisms for this are already inplace. The next stage was to determine which forest reserves add most species to these pre-selectedareas, giving preference to sites which are suitable for nature reserve establishment. Therefore thecomplementarity table was continued with the addition of all sites classified as being of high naturereserve suitability, then adding those of medium suitability, before completing the table with those of

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low nature reserve suitability at the bottom. In this way we deliberately disadvantaged forests that areheavily stocked with timber and located in densely populated rural areas in the search for nature reservesites which can be more readily protected and maintained at lower cost, in terms of alternative usesforegone. Thus the modified complementarity table was structured as illustrated in Table 4.

Table 4. Modified complementarity table, sorted to minimize selection of‘high cost’ sites

Category Cumulative total% species

NATIONAL PARKS (10 sites)12etcCumulative total after adding all National Parks 77STEEP WATER CATCHMENT RESERVES (13 sites)12etcCumulative total after adding all catchment reserves 85MOST ‘SUITABLE’ FORESTS FOR NATURE RESERVES(16 sites)12Cumulative total after adding all most suitable forests 89MODERATELY ‘SUITABLE’ FORESTS FOR NRs (16sites)12Cumulative total after adding all moderately suitable forests 93LEAST ‘SUITABLE’ FORESTS FOR NRs (16 sites)12Cumulative total after adding all remaining sites 100

We considered a wide range of alternatives, details of which are provided elsewhere (ForestDepartment, 1999). Exploring them enabled us to reach decisions over the criteria to use in derivingthe final preferred complementarity table, which was built up in layers each involving a defined groupof sites. At the top of the final table we introduced national parks (a group of 9 sites; Mgahingaexcluded for lack of data), before adding a second group comprising (3) sites contributing at least 2%of species overall in the second complementarity analysis (described in the preceding paragraph),where sites were introduced to minimize selection of those where land-use conflict is most likely. Wethen added sites with concentrations of species not found elsewhere in Uganda’s protected areas (agroup of 6 additional sites each accounting for at least 1% of the species total within any taxon); thensites contributing at least 1% of remaining species, within at least one taxon (a group of 5 sites); siteswith a significant number of species, and/or at least one ‘endemic’ species not found elsewhere inUganda’s protected areas (a group of 18 sites); and finally sites supporting a vegetation sub-type notalready represented (a group of 7 sites).

Step 4: Initial selection of nature reserve sites

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All forest sites included in the final complementarity table were thus selected for nature reserveestablishment. To differentiate between sites according to their importance in the national protectedarea system, we distinguished three categories (designated as prime, core and secondary). The morebiologically important prime and core sites were allocated substantially larger areas for designation asnature reserves, so as to maximize their chances of remaining viable in the long term. The criteria usedin defining core, prime and secondary sites are described elsewhere (Howard et al., 2000).

Step 5: Evaluate potential alternative nature reserve sites

Recognizing that the application of rigid criteria may not be practical (for example, somebody mayseek to establish a gold mine in one of the selected sites), we then examined the potential foralternatives to the preferred sites. We carried out cluster analysis, based on the TWINSPAN procedurefor each taxon, to identify groups of forests supporting similar suites of species which might besubstituted for one another if necessary.

Stage Four: Allocation of Management Zones within each Forest

Having selected our list of forests, we proceeded to allocate a proportion of each site’s total area fordesignation as nature reserves, recognizing the relative importance of the three categories (prime, core,and secondary). In making these allocations, we decided to apply specified absolute minimum areas,aimed at maximizing the long-term maintenance of biodiversity at smaller sites. For prime forest siteswe allocated 30-35% to nature reserves, subject to an absolute minimum size of 100km2. For core sites20-30% was allocated to nature reserves, subject to an absolute minimum size of 50km2 (not to exceed70% of a site’s total area, as local people cannot be totally excluded). For ‘secondary’ sites weallocated 10-20% to nature reserves, subject to an absolute minimum size of 20km2 (not to exceed 70%of a site’s total area). Within each category we decided on nature reserve allocations for each forest onthe basis of their nature reserve suitability scores, with low, medium and high suitability ratingscorresponding to (arbitrary) 5% intervals in allocations.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

The results of this work are described in detail in the Forestry Nature Conservation Master Plan (ForestDepartment, 1999), which is now being implemented by the Uganda Forest Department. A summaryversion of the results has been published elsewhere (Howard et al., 2000).

Some general conclusions arising from this work, which are likely to be relevant to other forestprotected area planning initiatives are worth summarizing here. The programme involved more than100 person-years of work and cost something in excess of US$1 million. This makes it unlikely thatsimilar programmes will be undertaken elsewhere in the tropics without strong justification (but seeBalmford & Gaston, 1999), and all the more important to draw out lessons that are likely to find widerapplication.

One important lesson is that a representative network of protected areas necessarily includes manysites. It is not sufficient to create several large reserves and expect them to protect a country’sbiodiversity, even if these reserves individually protect viable populations of the species representedthere. A surprisingly large number of Ugandan sites (52 of the 64 investigated) support species that wefound nowhere else, thus making these sites irreplaceable components of a representative network ofreserves.

Secondly, it is clear from our work that designing a network of reserves on the basis of representing thefull range of vegetation types is not sufficient, because apparently similar vegetation types actuallysupport quite different assemblages of species. We found that a minimum complementary set of sitesselected to include all Ugandan vegetation types (based on the work of Langdale-Brown et al. 1964,which distinguishes almost 100 distinct vegetation communities in Uganda) would account for only81.6% of species from our indicator groups (unpublished data).

Finally, we found that surveying multiple taxa in the way that we did is unnecessarily expensive whenthe objective is the design of a representative reserve network. Complementary sets of sites selected onthe basis of their bird or butterfly faunas included at least as many species overall as those selected

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using the whole data set (Howard et al., 1998). Thus, in future site selection exercises of this kind itshould be possible to limit the number of indicator groups to just one or two, thereby reducing siteassessment costs considerably.

REFERENCES

Balmford A and Gaston K.J, 1999. Why biodiversity surveys are good value. Nature398: 204-205.

Forest Department, 1999. Forestry nature conservation master plan. Uganda ForestDepartment, Kampala, Uganda

Hamilton A.C, 1984. Deforestation in Uganda. Oxford University Press, Nairobi, Kenya.

Howard P.C, 1991. Nature conservation in Uganda’s tropical forest reserves. IUCN, Gland,Switzerland.

Howard P.C, and T.R.B. Davenport, editors. 1996. Forest Biodiversity Reports. Vols.1-33. Uganda Forest Department, Kampala, Uganda.

Howard P.C, P. Viskanic, T.R.B. Davenport, F.W. Kigenyi, M. Baltzer, C.J. Dickinson, J.S. Lwanga,R.A. Matthews and A. Balmford. 1998. Complementarity and the use of indicator groups for reserveselection in Uganda. Nature 394: 472-475.

Howard P.C, T.R.B Davenport, F.W. Kigenyi, P. Viskanic, M.C. Baltzer, C.J. Dickinson, J. Lwangwa,R.A. Matthews and E. Mupada. 2000. Protected area planning in the tropics: Uganda’s national systemof forest nature reserves. Conservation Biology 14: 858-875.

Johnson N.C, 1995. Biodiversity in the balance: approaches to setting geographic conservationpriorities. Biodiversity Support Program, Washington D.C.

Langdale-Brown I, H.A. Osmaston, and J.G. Wilson. 1964. The vegetation of Uganda and its bearingon land-use. Government Printer, Entebbe, Uganda.

Prendergast J.R, S.N. Wood, J.H.Lawton and B.C. Eversham. 1993. Correcting for variation inrecording effort in analyses of diversity hotspots. Biodiversity Letters 1: 39-53.

Pressey R.L, C.J. Humphries, C.R. Margules, R.I. Vane-Wright, and P.H. Williams. 1993. Beyondopportunism: key principles for systematic reserve selection. TREE 8: 124-128.

Pressey R.L, I.R. Johnson, and P.D. Wilson. 1994. Shades of irreplaceability: towards a measure of thecontribution of sites to a reservation goal. Biodiversity and Conservation 3: 242-262.

Vane-Wright R.I, C.J. Humphries, and P.H. Williams. 1991. What to protect? Systematics and theagony of choice. Biological Conservation 55: 234-254.

Nature Tourism and Protected Area Pricing: Lessons learned fromAfrica

Wolf Krug

Abstract

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Decreasing public resources for the environment puts pressure on Africanresource managers and policy makers to develop alternative strategiesfor financing protected areas. Nature tourism is the fastest growingsector in many African countries and is regarded as an opportunity toprovide funding for conservation. However, studies on the economic valueof tourism show that there is often a significant gap between naturetourism’s actual and potential contribution to biodiversity conservation.Park entry fees are the most important source of revenue for protectedareas, but the degree of revenue capture is low, due to inappropriatepricing policies and inefficient financial management systems.

Improving efficiency in park pricing is an important step towardsachieving economic sustainability in protected area management. Examplesof innovative pricing policies are price differentiation between tourists ofdifferent origin, differential pricing of parks and linking foreign tourists’park fees to a hard currency value. The key to efficient pricing is a soundunderstanding of supply and demand in the nature tourism market. Acomparison of pricing policies across eastern and southern Africa showsto what extent African countries make use of such approaches.

Wolf KrugCentre for Social and Economic Research on the Global EnvironmentUniversity College LondonGower StreetLondon WC1E 6BTUNITED KINGDOMemail: w.krug@ucl.ac.uk

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Nature Tourism and Protected Area Pricing: Lessons learned fromAfrica

Wolf Krug

IntroductionProtected areas (PAs) in developing countries play a key role in protecting the world’sbiological diversity. However, increasing land-use conflicts and decreasing funds forconservation threaten their very existence. Governments in poor countries find itincreasingly difficult to provide sufficient funding for the maintenance of their PAs.Public pressure to reduce poverty and enhance economic development has causedmany governments to cut their spending on the environment. This has initiated alively debate among policy makers and resource managers on how to secure the long-term economic sustainability of PAs. Much of the debate concentrates on developingalternative funding mechanisms (e.g. private sector funding), promoting cost-effectivemanagement practices, improving financial self-sufficiency as well as promoting thefinancial independence of PAs. This paper looks at an existing funding mechanism,namely park entry fees, and argues that more efficient park pricing policies canincrease the financial self sufficiency of PAs and therefore limit their dependence ongovernment subsidies. The importance of optimal park entry pricing is highlightedand policy suggestions are made for maximizing economic returns from PA tourism.The paper is structured as follows: the second section demonstrates the links betweennature tourism and PAs in Africa. Section 3 focuses on estimating recreationaldemand for PAs and presents some empirical results. Section 4 suggests strategies formaximizing returns from PA tourism. Section 5 compares pricing policies acrosseastern and southern Africa and shows to what extent African countries make use ofsuch approaches.

Nature tourism and protected areasProtected areas are of great importance for Africa’s nature tourismindustry, attracting millions of national and international tourists everyyear. Nature tourism ranks among the top three industries in mosteastern and southern African countries. It supports hundreds ofthousands of jobs, earns urgently needed foreign exchange andcontributes to economic development. International nature tourism can beinterpreted as global demand for biodiversity conservation in Africa and,in turn, protected areas supply the essential resources for the survival ofthe industry. Well-known nature tourism destinations are South Africa,Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Botswana, and Namibia. Total tourist numbersincreased steadily over the last decade, indicating a growing demand fortourism in the region. It is difficult to estimate the exact share ofnature tourism in the overall tourism market but, according to surveyestimates, nature tourism appears to account for at least 70 per cent ofthe overseas visitor market. Within the nature tourism market, wildlife

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viewing in PAs is the single most important activity. Table 1 shows theresults from surveys in specific countries.

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Table 1 The importance of nature activities in the overseas visitormarket

Country Among all overseas visitors Source

Kenya 80% come to these countries primarily for the wildlife Filion et al., 1994

Namibia 73% join a wildlife viewing safari MET, 1997

South Africa A range of estimates attribute between 10 and 90% ofall international arrivals to wildlife viewing

Wells, 1996

Zimbabwe 80% come to these countries primarily for the wildlife Filion et al., 1994

Besides its contribution to economic development, nature tourism is regarded as anopportunity to generate financial resources for conservation and, in theory, tourismrevenues related to wildlife and PAs should provide incentives for the private andpublic sectors to invest in conservation. However, studies on the economic value oftourism show that there is often a significant gap between nature tourism's actual andpotential contribution to biodiversity conservation. Protected areas, often providingthe central element of the nature tourism experience, capture only a fraction of itsrecreational value. Economic impact assessments show that the greatest share of theeconomic benefits linked to tourist expenditure is captured by commercial operatorsin the richer countries (where most tourists originate) and in larger cities of the hostcountries. The economic impact of nature tourism is usually measured as the totalamount of tourists' spending on accommodation, food, travel, souvenirs and otherexpenditure. All this spending occurs on various spatial scales and often only a smallfraction is spent on site (Creemers, 1996). According to the World Bank, total touristexpenditure in eastern and southern Africa amounted to US$ 3.7 billion in 1996(World Development Indicators, 1998). Probably 50 to 80 per cent of this can bedirectly or indirectly attributed to nature tourism. Figure 1 illustrates the spatialdistribution of foreign tourists’ trip expenditure.

Tourist expenditure can also induce positive 'multiplier' effects by stimulating furtherspending and thus even increase the economic impact of tourism. However, multipliereffects are limited by leakage of tourism revenues. At a national level, tourismleakage is the proportion of the receipts derived from foreign visitors that leave thecountry (Wells, 1997). Many countries are too underdeveloped and undiversified tooffer the necessary goods and services for tourism. Importing these goods andservices leads to a leakage of tourism revenues so that little money stays in the hostcountry, let alone the local area providing the natural attractions. Brown et al. (1995)analysed the expenditure of international visitors to Hwange and Mana Pools NationalPark in Zimbabwe. They estimate that 61 per cent of the parks' total use value leavesthe country to the benefit of tour operators and airlines in northern countries.

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Estimating the recreational value of protected areasEconomic impact assessments remain an incomplete measure of theeconomic value of nature tourism. They are useful to demonstrate thespatial distribution of benefits or the distribution of benefits amongdifferent parts of the population, but fail to capture values beyondcurrent market transactions. In contrast, welfare assessments arecapable of estimating the total economic value of nature tourism,including non-market benefits, tourists may hold such as option andexistence values. Welfare assessments measure the recreational value ofPAs in the form of tourists’ aggregate maximum willingness to pay (WTP)for their experience. The most common method for measuring maximumWTP for a nature tourism activity is the contingent valuation method. Thecontingent valuation method is a survey-based technique capable ofeliciting human preferences for a change in the provision of anenvironmental good (quality and/or quantity change). WTP includestourists’ expenditure and their consumer surplus, which is the differencebetween the amount actually paid and the maximum amount they would be

PA

Rest of the World

Expenditure from inter-national tourists

Country of Residence

ConsumerSurplus

L

L

PA = Protected Area; L = Leakage

Figure 1 International nature tourism: expenditure, leakage and consumer surplus

Country

Local Area

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prepared to pay. Figure 2 shows the concept of consumer surplus and thetotal recreational value of a protected area.

The demand curve indicates how many visits will be made at each priceand reflects declining marginal benefits from additional visits to adestination. The area ADEC represents tourists’ maximum willingness topay for visiting the park. The area BCED represents tourists’ totalexpenditure at a price X. The consumer surplus, the amount that touristswould have been prepared to pay over and above the prevailing price X, isequivalent to the area ABC. This consumer surplus can be interpreted asforgone revenue that could have been captured at the optimal set ofentry fees.

Another technique capable of estimating uncaptured tourism benefits isthe travel cost method. This method uses differences in travel and othercosts to individuals making use of a recreational site to infer therecreational value of the site. But in contrast to the contingent valuationmethod, the travel-cost method cannot measure non-use values.Contingent valuation estimates are likely to represent a mixture of thedifferent values tourists place on biological resources, such as option

Quantity YNumber of Visits

Demand Curve

Park fee in $

Price X

A

BC

D E

Figure 2 Demand for nature tourism

Consumer Surplus

Expenditure

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values, existence values and direct-use values (the value tourists place onvisiting the park).

Empirical EvidenceSeveral studies have been carried out over the past years investigatingtourists' WTP for nature tourism in Africa. Much of the work hasconcentrated on the economic value of wildlife viewing in protected areas.All studies exhibit large uncaptured values in the form of consumersurplus. The annual consumer surplus for wildlife-viewing trips isestimated to be $20 million for Botswana (Barnes, 1996), $41 million forNamibia (Barnes et al., 1997) and $450 million for Kenya (Moran, 1994).Considering these WTP figures relative to collected park fees, it ispossible to conclude that nature tourism is being under-priced. Contingentvaluation studies directly investigating tourists’ WTP for park feessupport this assumption. Table 2 gives consumer surplus estimates forsome African national parks. The estimates given represent aggregatedconsumer surplus for all tourists visiting the resort over the period of ayear. This aggregate consumer surplus can be interpreted as yearlyforgone revenue for park managers and landowners, i.e. revenue that,ideally, they could have captured.

Navrud and Mungatana (1994) report an annual consumer surplus of $7.5 million forLake Nakuru National Park in Kenya. Brown et al. (1995) estimate the total economicvalue of the wildlife-viewing industry related to Mana Pools and Hwange NationalPark in Zimbabwe to be worth $50 million. From this amount a consumer surplus of$8.1 million (16%) remains uncaptured. Clark et al. (1995) report a consumer surplusof $0.35 million for Lake Tarangire National Park in Tanzania. The annual consumersurplus for visiting Etosha National Park in Namibia is worth $1.4 million (Krug,2000). In fact, entry fees for African game parks have traditionally been low,explaining the large consumer surplus figures. Several African countries haveincreased park fees in recent years.

Table 2 Aggregate consumer surplus for nature tourism in Africannational

parks (million US$ per annum)*

Protected Area Localtourists

Internationaltourists

Total

Mana Pools & Hwange NP (Zimbabwe, 1994) ? 8.10 8.10Lake Nakuru NP (Kenya, 1991) little most 7.50Tarangire NP (Tanzania, 1994) 0.10 0.25 0.35Etosha NP (Namibia, 1997) 0.32 1.09 1.40

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* Only contingent valuation results are reported.

The case studies show that foreign tourists' consumer surplus exceedslocal consumer surplus significantly. There are two reasons for this: first,foreign tourists indicate a much higher WTP than locals and, second,foreign tourists outweigh domestic visitors in total numbers. In Namibia,70% of all park visitors are non-Namibian residents. In many parks inBotswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Tanzania, foreign tourists make up over70% of the total visitor numbers.

Pricing policies for protected areasCharging visitors an entry fee to PAs is the most widely appliedinstrument for capturing the economic value of nature tourism. Park fees,also named user fees, entrance fees or entry fees, are easy to implementand can be an important source of income for conservation. However, asjust indicated, large amounts of revenue can be lost due to inefficientpark pricing and leakage. This section presents some policies foroptimizing park fees and hence increasing revenues. While the remainderof this paper focuses mainly on economic efficiency, it should be notedthat strict revenue maximization might not always be the appropriatepolicy. Setting park fees for a country’s network of PAs requires acareful balance of economic, social and ecological objectives. A low-feepolicy can be appropriate for policy makers when the goal is not strictlyto maximize revenues but also to afford visitors a positive experience, toencourage them to return, and to promote visitation rates in the parks.For example, one may not want to exclude low-income groups from sitesthat have a high educational value or citizens from enjoying their naturalheritage. Many African counties have for this reason adopted a ‘low-feepolicy’ for citizens. A low-fee policy can, on the other hand, be dangerousif tourist numbers exceed the park’s environmental carrying capacity. Insuch cases park fees should be increased to prevent environmentaldamage due to excess demand.

The optimal level of park feesThe previous section shows that park fees are often not set according to supply anddemand in the nature tourism market. As a result, park entry fees can be either too lowor too high. Contingent valuation studies can be a helpful tool for investigatingdemand for different parks as well as for analysing WTP differences betweenoverseas, regional and local tourists. As a general experience, overseas tourists are

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often undercharged while regional tourists are overcharged. Both overseas andregional tourists (tourists from neighbouring counties) are usually treated asforeigners and therefore pay the same fees. Empirical evidence shows that regionalvisitors in developing countries have often a much lower WTP than overseas tourists(Krug, 2000). As a result of increased park fees for foreigners in recent years,visitation rates from neighbouring countries have dropped drastically. This has, so far,not been regarded as a problem since the drop in regional tourism has been offset byan increasing demand from overseas. However, the increasing dependence onoverseas visitors can be dangerous since the overseas visitor market is very sensitiveto the costs of airfares and to political instability. The larger the share of overseasvisitors in the tourism market, the greater the risk.

Price differentiation between different groups of touristsPAs are usually state property and are under direct control of a nationalprotected area authority (PAA). Although the number of privatelymanaged parks and reserves is growing, the market is still far from beingcompetitive. PAAs often have some form of monopoly power over visits toprotected areas. This allows the use of complicated pricing and marketingstrategies to increase profits. As a monopolist, a national PAA canincrease park entry prices without losing customers to competitors. Onlythose customers that are not willing or not able to pay the entry fee willbe lost.

A common strategy for increasing a monopolist’s profit is price differentiation. Thismeans charging different groups of people different prices for the same good. In thecontext of PAs, one can easily differentiate between different groups of naturetourists. The most widely applied approach is to discriminate between tourists fromdifferent geographical origins. Overseas tourists are often willing to pay higher feesthan local or regional tourists. So why not charge them a higher fee? As Lindberg(1991) argues, higher park fees for foreigners are equitable insofar as they usuallyhave higher incomes, they do not pay taxes to support protected areas, and they do notbear the opportunity costs of not using the land for agriculture, logging, or otheractivities.

Very important in terms of pricing are the elasticities of demand. Overseas demandfor park visits is generally more inelastic (less price sensitive) than local or regionaldemand (Barnes, 1996; Navrud and Mungatana, 1994). Since this has importantimplications for revenue maximization, it will be explained in more detail. Let usconsider tourist demand for a national park, ignoring possible substitution sites.Figure 3 gives an example of the own-price elasticities of demand for tourists fromdifferent origins. In this graph international tourists' demand is price inelastic andlocal tourists' demand is price elastic. This can be seen in the different slopes of thedemand curves. A price increase would therefore have a much greater impact on localtourists' visitation rates than on that of foreign tourists. Consider what might happen ifpark managers were aware of foreign tourists' inelastic demand, again assuming that

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there are no substitute sites. Raising the park fee for foreigners from PF0 to PF1 wouldresult in a drop of foreign visitation rates from QF0 to QF1.

However, because of the shape of the demand curve, revenues from foreign visitorswill increase. Area D would be lost due to fewer visitors but areas A and B, whichtogether are larger than area D, would be gained because of the increased capture ofconsumer surplus. Now, consider what would happen if park managers also raiseresident fees to PF1. This would result in a loss of areas D and E but only in a gain ofarea B. Because area B is much smaller than area D+E, this price policy would resultin a revenue loss. This simple example illustrates the possible impact of increased feeson park revenues, depending on different price elasticities of demand.

Wildlife viewing in Botswana is an example of highly inelastic demand: in 1989 theDepartment of Wildlife and National Parks raised the park fees for non-residents by500 to 900 per cent (from $1.2 to $7 or $11.5 depending on the site). The fee increasehad no effect on the general growth pattern of foreign visitor numbers but monthlypark revenues increased by some 890 per cent (Barnes, 1996). However, the newprices lead to substitution effects within the group of non-resident tourists, resulting ina drop in the number of visitors from neighbouring African countries and a furtherincrease in visitors from overseas.

Number of Visits

International Demand

Park feein $

Figure 3 Local and overseas tourists' demand

Local Demand

PF 1

PF 0; PR

QF 0QF1

F = Foreigners; R = Residents; Q = Quantity; P = Price

D

A

B

QR

C E

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Differential park pricingDemand for visits to protected areas within a country is highly dependent on site-specific characteristics such as ecosystem type, vegetation, wildlife diversity/density,possible recreational activities, tourism infrastructure, the park's accessibility and theprice. Visitation rates vary according to these characteristics. Raising fees at one parkcan influence visitation rates at other parks depending on the cross-price elasticities ofdemand (their degree of substitutability). To the extent that any park is unique,demand for it will be less than perfectly elastic and there will be an opportunity fordifferential pricing to capture additional rents.

So far, only one study has calculated revenue maximizing park fees for a set ofprotected areas in a developing country. Chase et al. (1998) applied a contingentbehaviour methodology to generate experimental data on the effects of different pricestructures on foreign visitation demand for three national parks in Costa Rica. Theyconclude that current park fees are not optimal in terms of revenue maximization andthat differentiated park fees are needed. Implementing the optimal fee structure wouldmean reducing the fee level at two parks (-42% and -5.6%) and raising the fee level atone park (+42.2%). The revenues are expected to increase sharply, by $1.04 million as aresult of the policy.

In practice, differential park pricing is not only used for economic reasons but also forenvironmental purposes. As such it can be applied as a management tool to influencevisitation rates within a network of PAs.

Daily pricing vs. once-per-entry pricing

The most common approach is to charge tourists a daily park fee althougha few countries apply once-per-entry pricing. The latter means thatvisitors pay only a one-off fee, no matter how many days they intend tostay. Park managers usually favour daily park fees since it allows a betterhandling of visitor numbers (especially when the park management has nocontrol over the price of accommodation in the park). Once-per-entrypricing can make it difficult to restrict tourist numbers to carryingcapacity and leaves accommodation charges as the only mechanism toinfluence the amount of days overnight visitors stay in parks. Daily pricingis in most cases the option that maximizes revenues.

Exchange rates and park pricingThere is good reason for developing countries to link park fees for foreign tourists to acertain ‘hard currency’ value (e.g. US Dollars). This is especially useful if the localcurrency is likely to lose value against so called hard currencies. Countries likeKenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe quote park fees for foreign tourists in US Dollars butallow visitors to pay the equivalent amount in local currency. This ensures thatexchange rate fluctuations or a devaluation of local currency will not affect foreigndemand for protected areas. It also allows park authorities to forecast foreign demandmore accurately and makes it easier for tourists and tour operators to calculate tripcosts. Another advantage is that the weaker the local currency gets the higher are thepark revenues in local currency terms.

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The impact of the institutional setting on tourists’ willingness to pay

There is strong evidence that the relevant institution responsible forcollecting park fees and financing conservation has a significant effect ontourists' willingness to pay for park fees. A survey in Namibia revealsthat tourists are willing to pay higher fees if it could be guaranteed that,instead of the government, a non-governmental organization (such as theWWF) would be responsible for managing the park's revenues (Krug,2000). This reflects a public distrust of government institutions and is acommon phenomenon in many developing and developed countries. Handingover the responsibility to a non-governmental institution offers thepotential to increase a park's recreational value and hence would allow thecapture of additional revenues.

African park fee policiesTable 3 shows non-resident (foreigners), non-national resident and citizenpark fees for several eastern and southern African countries inNovember 1998. If a country applies differential park pricing severalnumbers are given in a row. The last column shows fees for vehicles.

With the exception of South Africa and Namibia, all countries have daily park feesAll eastern and southern African countries, except South Africa, differentiate betweencitizens and non-residents, thereby meeting the twin objectives of raising revenuesfrom those with the ability to pay and without denying citizens access to their naturalheritage. By charging foreign and local visitors the same fees, South Africa loses a lotof revenues in the form of foreign tourists’ consumer surplus.

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Table 3 Daily park fees for African protected areas in November 1998 (in US$)*

Country Non-residents Non-nationalresidents

Citizens Fee for a car(once perentry)**

Eastern Africa

Kenya 15; 20; 23; 27 [51)] 1.7; 2.6; 3.4; 4.3[1.71)]

1.7 [1.71)] L&F 3.5

Malawi 15 ? ? F 15 per day

Tanzania 15; 25 [502); 1003)] 15; 25 [202); 403)] 1.5; 2.2 [2.22);2.23)]

L 1.5, F 30per day

Uganda 7; 15 [1754); 2505)] 3.6; 7.3 [1504); 1805)] 1.5 [404); 505)] L 3.7, F 20

Southern Africa

Botswana 11.5 2.3 0.5 L 0.5, F 2.3

Namibia6) 2.2; 4.4; 6.6 2.2; 4.4; 6.6 1.1; 2.2; 3.3 L&F 2.2

South Africa (once per entry):

- Kwazulu-N.NCS7)

1.5 1.5 1.5 L&F 6.6

- SA NationalParks8)

1.8; 2.7; 6.6; 8 1.8; 2.7; 6.6; 8 1.8; 2.7; 6.6; 8 L&F 5.3

Zambia 15; 20 2 2 L 5; F 10

Zimbabwe9) 5 5 0.3 L&F 0.3

Notes:* - Park fees for adult visitors on a privately organized safari (some countries offer commercial tour

operators price reductions for their clients)- Several park fees are reported for countries with a multiple park pricing policy- Fees in local currency are converted at November 1998 exchange rates

** L = locally registered vehicle, F = foreign registered vehicle1) Marine Parks2) Mahale NP3) Chimpanzee trekking in Gombe Stream NP4) Gorilla trekking in Mgahinga Gorilla NP5) Gorilla trekking in Bwindi Impenetrable NP (lower fees are charged for stand-by tickets).6) Day visitors only - overnight visitors pay no park fees (1997 exchange rate).7) Kwazulu-Natal Nature Conservation Service: On top of the park fee, visitors to protected areas in

Kwazulu-Natal have to pay a community levy. Depending on the site, this levy ranges from $0.2 - $2.2per entry and is used to support development in neighbouring communities. (1997 exchange rate)

8) South African National Parks: Day visitors pay a daily park fee (for each day they enter). Overnightvisitors to Kruger NP, Kalahari Gemsbok NP and Richtersveld NP pay the park fee only once whenentering a park. At all other parks overnight visitors pay no park fee (1997 exchange rate).

9) Visitors have also the option to pay a park fee covering a period of seven days. This weekly fee is $10for foreigners and $0.6 for citizens.

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No country differentiates between overseas and regional tourists. Beingforeign nationals, both tourist groups pay the same fees. Many Africancountries have increased park fees for foreigners in recent years. Itseems that the fee increase was often based on overseas tourists’ WTPand little attention was paid to other African citizens. African parkauthorities have failed to account for the huge WTP difference betweenthese two groups. As a result, the numbers of cross border visits to parksin neighbouring countries dropped drastically. Barnes (1996) describesthis phenomenon for Botswana.

The treatment of non-national residents varies greatly. While somecountries regard them as foreigners some others treat them as citizensor have even introduced a special fee category for non-national residents(Uganda, Botswana). Comparing park fees for non-residents acrosscountries, one can see that, with the exception of Zambia, park fees insouthern Africa (ranging from $1.5 to $11.5 depending on the site) aremuch lower than park fees in eastern Africa (ranging from $7 to $27).Special activities such as chimpanzee trekking in Tanzania or gorillatrekking in Uganda cost about $100 to $250 per day. So far, no study hasbeen carried out to investigate the effect of this price disparity on therelative competitiveness of eastern and southern African countries in thenature tourism market. All countries have relatively low fees for citizensranging from $1.5 to $2. Only protected areas managed by “SouthAfrican National Parks” have citizens' fees of up to $8.

With the exception of Malawi, Botswana, Zimbabwe and the Kwazulu-Natal Provincein South Africa, all countries adopted a system of differential pricing of parks. Thishelps to reduce pressure at congested parks by channelling visitors to less popularsites. Kenya, for example, has four different price categories for its parks althoughthis is only applicable to non-residents and non-national residents. Non-residents paida daily fee of:

• $27 for Aberdares NP, Amboseli NP and Lake Nakuru NP• $25 for Tsavo East NP and Tsavo West NP• $20 for Nairobi NP, Meru NP and Shimba Hills National Reserve• $15 for all other protected areas.

Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe quote park fees for non-residentsin US Dollars, thereby ensuring that international demand for parks remainsunaffected by exchange rate fluctuations. Park fees in Tanzania even have to be paidin US Dollars. Botswana, Namibia and South Africa quote their park fees in localcurrencies. As a result, park visits became 20 per cent cheaper for overseas touriststhrough a devaluation of the South African Rand and the Namibia Dollar in summer1998. It makes sense for more developing countries to link foreign tourists’ park feesto a certain US Dollar value. However, experience from Tanzania shows that foreign

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tourists strongly dislike the fact that park fees have to be paid in US Dollars. It forcesthem to purchase Dollars prior to their visit to Tanzania.

ConclusionsUntil recently, PA managers have had little experience in establishing feeprogrammes, and in particular, in choosing an economically efficient price level.Decreasing financial support from the government, however, has prompted them toreconsider their pricing strategies and focus on revenue maximizing strategies. Thesolution for optimal pricing lies in discriminatory pricing. Price differentiationbetween foreign and local tourists is meanwhile standard practice while differentialpark pricing is still not that common. It is important to recognize that optimal parkentry prices are interdependent because a change in price at one park inducessubstitution effects among other parks and affects the optimal price at those parks.The inter-relatedness of park prices due to their substitution relationships in demand isan important, and sometimes overlooked, fact in optimal park pricing.

It is very difficult to judge whether African pricing policies are efficient. While somecountries seem to apply sophisticated pricing systems, others have not adopted any ofthe suggested policies for increasing park revenues. However, even the most complexpricing structure says little about the degree of revenue capture. It depends solely onwhether the fees are based on a proper analysis of supply and demand in the naturetourism market. In fact, most park authorities have set the park fees without prioreconomic assessment and if at all, only crude demand figures were used as anindicator (e.g. visitor numbers). It can therefore be expected that many African pricingpolicies are still not optimal. Improving economic efficiency in national pricingpolicies is therefore important and will help to increase the financial self sufficiencyof PAs.

As important as revenue generation itself are the issues of revenue management andspending. At present, it seems that, with the exception of a few countries, parkearnings are not directly re-invested in conservation. Instead, park revenues are oftentreated as sources of general revenue rather than earmarked for park maintenance orbiodiversity conservation. While governments are fully entitled to decide about theirpriorities for public spending, this does have the effect of destroying the incentive forpark managers to develop parks as a viable nature tourism destination and to collecthigher revenues. Hence the issues of benefit sharing becomes essential. It is importantthat revenues are channelled to those people who make the most important decisionsregarding the park’s continuing viability. These are usually local people and the PAstaff. Another crucial issue is the cost-effective spending of funds. Budget constraintsforce governments and park managers to carefully think about the best way to allocatelimited funds across parks and within parks. It will be necessary to develop somecriteria for defining investment priorities in conservation.

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ReferencesBarnes, J.I. (1996) Economic characteristics of the demand for wildlife-viewingtourism in Botswana. Development Southern Africa 13 (3), pp. 377-397

Barnes, J.I., Schier, C. and van Rooy, G. (1997) Tourists' willingness to pay forwildlife viewing and wildlife conservation in Namibia. DEA Research DiscussionPaper 15, Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Windhoek, Namibia

Brown, G., Ward, M. and Jansen, D.J. (1995) Economic Value of National Parks inZimbabwe: Hwange and Mana Pools. Report for ZWLMEC and World Bank

Chase, L.C., Lee, D.R., Schulze, W.D. and Anderson, D.J. (1998) Ecotourism demandand differential pricing of national parks in Costa Rica. Land Economics 74 (4), pp.

Clark, C., Davenport, L. and Mkanga, P. (1995) Designing Policies for Setting UserFees and Allocating Proceeds among Stakeholders: The Case of Tarangire NationalPark, Tanzania. Report to the World Bank

Creemers, G. (1996) Comments on “Economic Assessment of Protected Areas:Guidelines for their Assessment”. Unpublished. Natal Parks Board, Pietermaritzburg,South Africa

Filion, F., Foley, J.P. and A.J. Jaquemont (1994) The economics of global ecotourism.In: Protected Area Economics and Policy: Linking Conservation and SustainableDevelopment. Munasinghe, M. and J. McNeely (eds.). World Bank, Washington, D.C.

Krug, W. (2000) Pricing protected areas in Africa: Is Namibia's park pricing policyefficient? DEA Research Discussion Paper, Ministry of Environment and Tourism,Windhoek, Namibia (forthcoming)

Lindberg, K. (1991) Policies for Maximising Nature Tourism’s Ecological andEconomic Benefits. World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C.

MET (1997) Namibia Visitor Survey 1996/1997. Ministry of Environment andTourism, PPMIU, Windhoek, Namibia

Moran, D. (1994) Contingent valuation and biodiversity: Measuring the user surplusof Kenyan protected areas. Biodiversity and Conservation 3(8), pp. 663-684

Navrud, S. and E.D. Mungatana (1994) Environmental valuation in developingcountries: The recreational value of wildlife viewing. Ecological Economics, vol. 11,pp. 135-151

Wells, M. (1996) The Economic and Social Contribution of Protected Areas in NewSouth Africa. Land and Agricultural Policy Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa

Wells, M. (1997) Economic Perspectives on Nature Tourism, Conservation andDevelopment, Environment Department Paper No. 5, Environmental EconomicSeries, The World Bank, Washington, D.C.

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World Development Indicators (1998) The World Bank, Washington, D.C.

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Parastatal Governance of State Protected Areas in Africa and theCaribbean

Alexander James1, Sam Kanyamibwa2 and Michael Green3

Abstract

Protected area systems throughout the world are chronically underfunded. Financial self-sufficiency is sometimes argued as a solutionand evidence shows that, in some cases, this has provided strongincentives for managers to broaden their funding sources. But willfinancial self-sufficiency work in every case, especially given thatsome protected areas are less “attractive” financially than others? Ina national protected area system that contains a diverse mix of areas,some with higher revenue generating potential than others, what isthe best strategy for increasing funding? This paper argues thatwhile financial self-sufficiency creates powerful incentives,governments should not abandon their responsibility for fundingprotected areas, because of the important public goods provided bybiological diversity. Public goods are defined as those which arefreely available once provided, like ecosystem services, aesthetic andexistence values, scientific information and future option values. Aparks agency can only charge users for a fraction of these benefits,though it pays for their provision through their annual budget. As aresult, a better model may be financial independence rather thanfinancial self-sufficiency, defined where a park agency has theauthority to raise and retain its own revenues, but also receives anannual subvention from the government to assist in providing publicgoods. Several countries have adopted this strategy, and theirexperience will be reviewed briefly.

Presented by: Alister McFarquhar

1Alexander JamesUniversity of Cambridge18 Impetts LaneFulbournCambsUNITED KINGDOMemail: amm1002@cam.ac.uk

2 Sam KanyamibwaWWF Eastern Africa Regional Programme Office, Kenya

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3 Michael GreenBroads Authority, UK

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Parastatal Governance of State Protected Areas in Africa and theCaribbean

Alexander James, Sam Kanyamibwa and Michael Green

IntroductionProtected areas of the world are managed on very small budgets, often well below thelevel required for planned conservation (James et al., 1999a). Government funding ofprotected area agencies in developing countries amounts to only one third of thatrequired to achieve stated conservation objectives (James et al., 1999b). “Paperparks”- government gazetted protected areas with no administration or budget - arecommon in many parts of the world (IUCN, 1992; IUCN, 1994). As Dixon andSherman (1990: 78) said “Budget constraints make it unlikely that a system willreceive enough funding from the central government to manage all protected areas.”Parastatal agencies provide an alternative to state funding. A parastatal is a semi-autonomous organization that receives a grant from government, but can raise andretain revenue. Parastatals often raise funds in addition to park fees, includinginvestment and trust fund income, subscriptions and donations, and foreign assistance.Parastatals pay no dividends or taxes: so revenue can be used for conservation.Governments maintain ownership of the park assets and control parastatalmanagement by legislation and through representation on the board of directors.Institutional theory provides a framework for analysing the behaviour of agencies. Itsays that incentives affecting performance stem from three factors: formal or writtenlaws (and property rights), social conventions and constraints, and the level ofenforcement of each. When formal laws, policies and programmes are supported bysocial expectations and conventions, and given adequate enforcement, an institutionalincentive is created (North, 1990; Presber-James, 2000). A parastatal enjoys adifferent and semi-privatized incentive structure from a state-run institution, followinga formal change in legal designation and informal effects on agency managers.The formal difference is embodied in the structure of property rights affecting parkrevenues - the claim on the benefit stream arising from an asset. This claim must beenforced by a set of property rules (Bromley, 1991). In parastatals, a revenueproperty right is conferred by the State which creates an incentive for managers tooptimize revenues, subject to the constraint of conservation objectives. The successof such a change in governance depends on the degree to which the State continues tointervene through representation on parastatal boards with political objectives thatmight affect the potential of the parastatals for fundraising and more efficientmanagement. Such semi-privatization is similar to “cosmetic privatization” which hasresulted in the failure of such agencies to perform as expected in many parts of theworld (Francies and McFarquhar, 2000).Optimization of revenue cannot be guaranteed once property rights are transferred tothe agency. The modification of property rights is strictly formal; its effect on revenueoptimization depends on the informal rules and managers’ behaviour. Thestewardship ethic of the park managers determines the extent to which revenueoptimization and conservation goals are balanced. So how have parastatal protectedareas performed? We consider here if parastatals have performed better than stateagencies in raising revenues, though the quality of conservation cannot be directlymeasured. As usual in such cases, (conservation) output will have to be measured by(financial) input.

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Methods & DataParastatal protected area agencies are listed in a review of national budgets forprotected areas by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (James et al., 1999b).These parastatals and a control group of state-funded agencies were surveyed byquestionnaire that covered annual budgets, sources of funds, and their perceivedadequacy relative to conservation targets. 23 parastatal agencies and 29 state agenciesin 30 countries were included in the survey.Response was incomplete, but in line with previous WCMC experience in collectingdata on protected area budgets. Completed questionnaires were received from 8 outof the 30 countries. Six parastatals provided budgets: four in the Caribbean and two inAfrica. This was supplemented from other sources, primarily previous WCMCprotected area surveys (James et al., 1999b). This study compares agencies in theCaribbean and sub-Saharan Africa only.Agency performance is measured based on their annual expenditure (or “budget”),expressed per square kilometre (PSK) protected. Annual budgets include onlyoperating expenditure (but few countries reported any capital expenditure). Foreignfunds are excluded because of incomplete and inconsistent data, though a note ismade where foreign assistance is significant. Annual budgets refer to spending in themid-1990s, converted to 1996 US dollars using a US dollar deflator. Foreignexchange conversion rates and the US dollar deflator come from IMF (1997).The Caribbean and sub-Saharan African countries are treated separately. TheCaribbean comprises seven parastatal and seven government agencies. The Africanregion has four parastatals and eight government agencies. In each region, thebudgets for each agency are aggregated and means are compared. Parastatal andgovernment agencies are also compared within regions.In the Caribbean region, economies of scale in protected area management are takeninto account in the comparisons. Small protected areas are relatively expensive toadminister because of high fixed costs and a large perimeter to area ratio. As a result,budgets for small protected areas are high on a unit area basis. In the Caribbean,protected areas are fragmented and range from a few hectares (St. Lucia) to over onehundred square kilometres (Dominican Republic). As a result, agencies in theCaribbean are compared in three size classes: large (mean area greater than onehundred square kilometres), medium (mean area between ten and one hundred squarekilometres), and small (mean area less than ten square kilometres).In Africa, protected areas are generally large, and budgets are more likely to beinfluenced by economic development levels and availability of government funds. Socountries are loosely grouped by 1994 per capita income (World Bank, 1996): lowincome (below $150 per capita), medium (between $150 and $500), and high income($500 to $3000). This helps allow for differences in economic development whencomparing budgets.ResultsParastatal and state budgets for protected areas obtained in the survey appear in Table1 (Caribbean) and Table 2 (Africa).CaribbeanOn average, the parastatal protected areas in the Caribbean receive twice as much($1886 PSK), as state areas ($989 PSK). In two of three groups, the parastatals havegreater PSK budgets than the state agencies.The large size class has only two agencies: the Bahamas National Trust, a parastatal,and the Directorate of National Parks in the Dominican Republic, a state agency. Theparastatal budget is $324 PSK, compared with the $73 PSK state budget. The mean

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area protected in the state system is 504 square kilometres, considerably higher thanthe parastatal system at 208 square kilometres, so an economy of scale could justifysome of the difference in funding intensity.In the medium size class, the parastatals are two independently operated units onislands of the Netherlands Antilles, Bonaire and Saba. The five state units are Turksand Caicos, Dominica, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Kitts and Nevis. Themean area protected by the state agencies is 29 square kilometres, compared to 18square kilometres for the two parastatals. The parastatals spent $10,828 PSK onaverage, compared with $619 PSK by state agencies. The parastatals should havemore PSK funds, due to smaller mean areas, though these differences cannot explain abudget seventeen times greater. The highest state budget, for St. Kitts and Nevis, is$4441 PSK, well below either parastatal budget.Only in the small size group do the state agencies report higher budgets than theparastatals, with $90,157 PSK compared to $48,059 PSK. The one state agency toreport a budget is Bermuda, a country with a fragmented system of small parks (111protected areas averaging one square kilometre each). The parastatal countries eachhave larger mean areas under protection with the exception of St. Lucia.Perhaps most comparable with Bermuda in terms of mean area would be the St. LuciaNational Trust, which operates three protected areas totalling 0.33 square kilometres.The St. Lucia National Trust budget totals $560,752 (equivalent to $1.68 millionPSK), well above the PSK state budget in Bermuda. The three other parastatals in thesmall size class have smaller budgets than Bermuda, but only one by a major amount:Antigua ($40,123 PSK), Barbados ($50,120 PSK), and Montserrat ($5,220 PSK).AfricaIn Africa, parastatal protected area budgets average $556 PSK, compared with $38PSK for state agencies. In all three groups, the parastatals have greater PSK budgetsthan the state agencies.In the low income category, Tanzania’s parastatal agency is compared with stateagencies in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Zaire. The Tanzania National Parks budget is $170PSK, compared with only $16 PSK in the three state agencies. Tanzania NationalParks finances its budget mostly from tourism revenue. Donations amount to $3 PSKannually, and no subsidy comes from the State. The parastatal remits half its annualrevenues to the national treasury as corporation tax.In the intermediate income category, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) is theparastatal, compared with state agencies in Uganda, Zambia, and Malawi. KWS hasan unsubsidized budget of $310 PSK - more than ten times that of the state group,with an average budget of $29 PSK. Foreign assistance contributes an additional$160 PSK in operating funds and a further $739 PSK per annum in capital investment,for a total of $1,209 PSK. The KWS total budget approaches that of South Africa,with the highest protected area budgets in Africa.In the higher income category, the National Park Board of South Africa and theDepartment of Wildlife and National Parks in Zimbabwe, both parastatals, arecompared with state-funded agencies in Botswana and Namibia. The parastatalsbudget of $923 PSK, much exceeded $67 PSK in state-funded agencies. Theparastatal budgets are fifteen times higher – perhaps due to more intensivemanagement and population pressures in the South African and Zimbabwean parks.If so, the parastatal structure apparently has enabled these agencies to mobilize largerbudgets.

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Discussion

CaribbeanIncreased parastatal funding in the Caribbean is largely due to diversification ofrevenue sources. Revenue retention encourages agencies to develop new sources offunds, better services, and to charge for formerly free services.For example, in the large size class, the Bahamas National Trust, receives only $11PSK from the State, and adds $313 from park charges, subscriptions and donations.By comparison, its state funding is only a small fraction of the $73 PSK received bythe Dominican Republic Parks Agency, but its actual spending is much higher.In the medium size class, the parastatals on Bonaire and Saba are largelyindependently financed. Bonaire receives 3 per cent of its annual budget from theState, and Saba nothing. Both earn most revenue from visitor fees, primarily divingfees and boat moorings. Both seek donations from visitors and manage trust fundsthat contribute income. In Bonaire, donations contributed $104 PSK, and trust funds$398 PSK; Saba received $805 PSK in donations and $186 PSK in investmentinterest. Though only a small proportion of the budgets in Bonaire and Saba,donations and trust fund income alone are roughly equivalent to the control groupbudgets ($619 PSK).Further, both Bonaire and Saba are increasing revenue from charging visitors. This istheir main source of funds. Bonaire wants diving fees extended to cover all uses of themarine park, including the yachting, windsurfing, snorkelling, and private andcommercial moorings. Saba, unlike Bonaire, raises revenue from souvenir sales(equivalent to 23 per cent of operating funds).Also in the medium size class is the Department of Environmental and CoastalResources (DECR) of the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British dependency. The state-funded DECR is struggling for greater financial independence. Their budget is only$225 PSK, well under the $619 PSK average for medium-sized state conservationagencies in the Caribbean. The DECR budget covers less than half their conservationobjectives. The agency has tried to increase self-sufficiency, but proposals for raisingrevenue are resisted by the State (Garland, 1997). The DECR has proposed diving,boat licence fees, and an increase in hotel accommodation tax. The boat licence feeswere approved but the revenues must be returned to the Treasury. The State opposesthe “ring-fencing” of park revenues, which are perceived as state funds.In the small size class, St. Lucia is the only one of four parastatals with a budgetlarger than that of the Bermuda Parks Department. The St. Lucia National Trustbudget comprises nearly equal parts state grant and internal revenues; donations andsubscriptions add only one per cent. The St. Lucia National Trust spends nearly$750,000 PSK raised internally.Other parastatals in the small size class have also tried to raise and diversify revenue.The Antigua National Parks Authority plans to attract more visitors to the parks(Martin, 1997) by improving the range and quality of services. In Barbados, fees aretraditionally not charged. However, the parastatal proposes to introduce fees equal toabout 90 per cent of its budget.AfricaTourism revenues make a major contribution to the budgets of the African parastatals.Parastatals even in poor countries have shown it is possible to raise a lot of revenuethrough tourism. In the intermediate income category, the Kenya Wildlife Service hasbenefited from tourism in wildlife parks by raising entry fees, improving the visitor

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services, and marketing. The parastatals also attract foreign donors, and Kenya is agood example of the potential for foreign support.In contrast, the Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Project (LIRDP) inZambia manages wildlife resources in national parks in the Luangwa valley andnearby Game Management Areas. Property rights over the wildlife resources havebeen transferred to local communities (Lungu, 1990). The LIRDP receives foreignassistance, both bilaterally and from NGO donors. Some of the revenue raised byLIRDP goes to the national parks. In 1993, LIRDP added $41 PSK to the budget ofSouth Luangwa National Park and an adjacent game management area (Dublin et al.,1995). This helps to reduce the poaching in the parks, but produces inadequaterevenues for conservation.In the lower income category, Tanzania, like Kenya, attracts a large share of wildlifetourism in East Africa. But internal revenue is half that of the Kenya WildlifeService. So conservation and control of poaching, depends more on foreign fundingin Tanzania than in Kenya (e.g. Dublin et al., 1995). Tanzania National Parks shouldperhaps raise park fees like Kenya and take other steps to diversify revenue sources.In the higher income category, the South Africa National Parks Board’s large fundingdepends on a diversified revenue base. The State subsidy of $312 PSK is only 10 percent of the total budget. The National Parks Board generates revenue through visitorservices (68 per cent of budget), investment income (8 per cent of budget), anddonations (1 per cent). “Commercial operations…[once] in house are beingoutsourced,” reducing costs which helps fund further conservation (Fearnhead, 1997).The Board is currently seeking $100 million from foreign and domestic sources.Financial independence promotes efficiency, and the South Africa National ParksBoard and Kenya Wildlife Service set the right example. Recently, the ZimbabweDepartment of National Parks and Wildlife Management (DNPWM) has beenconverted into a parastatal. Their internally generated budget of $302 PSK is similarto that of Kenya. The state subsidy is $134 PSK, and foreign assistance $92 PSK, fora total of $528 PSK. Before, the state budget in Zimbabwe was $144 PSK (Martin,1993). The state subsidy has been roughly constant, but the new funds tripled thebudget.Summary and ConclusionRevenues raised in protected areas can be very large relative to state funding. TheState has little incentive for raising revenue from parks, partly because of theinsignificance of park revenues to the national treasury. By retaining these revenues,a parastatal agency can achieve major conservation benefits at little cost togovernments.The parastatal structure creates incentive for managers who want to raise revenues,reduce costs and attract foreign support, within conservation targets. Some parastatalsmay not take full advantage of financial independence (Tanzania). Other parastatalsdemonstrate better financial practice (Kenya). The difference most likely lies in theinformal practices and institutions at the agency level.Tourism creates a financial advantage in some countries over other less popularcountries, which may distort the analysis here. However, a parastatal is more likely toincrease revenue from tourism, given financial independence. Also, tourism spendingis usually distributed unevenly between parks within a country. Perhaps all parksshould be managed as a single national unit, so that an agency may redistribute fundsamong conservation areas.Nearly all of the parastatal agencies received some amount of funding fromgovernments. This is justified by the public goods provided by parks, related to

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biodiversity and ecosystem services, that may never attract enough revenues fromtourism or other sources (James et al., 2000). Though parastatals create betterincentives for park managers to raise and diversify revenues, some public funding islikely to remain necessary because parks provide society with values that are not easyto charge for. Thus, the financial autonomy provided by the parastatal structureshould not be equated with complete financial independence from government.

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ReferencesBromley, D. (1991) Environment and Economy: Private Rights and Public Policy.Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.Dixon, J. A. and Sherman, P. B. (1990) The Economics of Protected Areas: A NewLook at Benefits and Costs. Washington: Island Press.Dublin, H. T., Milliken, T. and Barnes, R. F. W. (1995) Four Years After the CITESBan: Illegal Killing of Elephants, Ivory Trade and Stockpiles. IUCN SpeciesSurvival Commission African Elephant Specialist Group. Gland, Switzerland:IUCN.Fearnhead, P. (1997) Response to Questionnaire on Investments in Protected Areasfrom the National Parks Board, South Africa. Cambridge: World ConservationMonitoring Centre (in litt.)Francies, J. and McFarquhar, A. (2000) “Why Cosmetic Privatization Fails.” AdamSmith Institute talk April 2000. www.geocities.com/ammmcfGarland, J. L. (1997) Response to Questionnaire on Investments in Protected Areasfrom Department of Environmental and Coastal Resources, Turks and Caicos Islands,British West Indies. Cambridge: World Conservation Monitoring Centre (in litt.)IMF (1997) International Financial Statistics. Washington: International MonetaryFund.IUCN (1992) Protected Areas of the World: A Review of National Systems. Volume3, Afrotropical. Gland, Switz.: IUCN.IUCN (1994) Protecting Nature: Regional Reviews of Protected Areas (J. A.McNeeley, J. Harrison, and P. Dingwall, eds.). Gland, Switz. and Cambridge, UK:IUCN (World Conservation Union).James, A. N., Gaston, K. J., Balmford, A. (1999a) “Balancing the Earth’s Accounts.”Nature, 401: 323-324.James, A. N., Green, M. J. B. and Paine, J. R. (1999b) A Global Review of ProtectedArea Budgets and Staff. Cambridge, UK: World Conservation Monitoring Centre(mimeo).James, A., Gaston, K.J., Balmford, A. (2000) “Why Private Institutions Alone WillNot Do Enough To Protect Biodiversity.” Nature, 404: 120.Lungu, F. (1990) “Luangwa Integrated Rural Development Project (LIRDP) andAdministrative Design for Game Management Areas (AMADE)” in Living WithWildlife: Wildlife Resource Management with Local Participation in Africa (A. Kiss,ed.). World Bank Technical Paper No. 130. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Martin, R. B. (1993) "Should Wildlife Pay Its Way?" (Keith Roby address,Department of National Parks and Wildlife, Perth, Australia, December 8, 1993) citedin Stephen R. Edwards, "Conserving Biodiversity; Resources for Our Future" in TheTrue State of the Planet (R. Bailey, ed.). New York: The Free Press.Martin, A. M. (1997) Response to Questionnaire on Investments in Protected Areasfrom National Parks Authority, Antigua. Cambridge: World ConservationMonitoring Centre (in litt.)North, D. (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Presber-James, S. (2000) “An Institutional Approach to Protected Area ManagementPerformance” in The Politics and Economics of Park Management (Anderson, T. andJames, A., eds.). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield (forthcoming).World Bank (1996) World Development Report 1996. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

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Table 1 Protected area budgets in the CaribbeanCountry Agency Budget

1996 US$ProtectedArea (KM2)

BudgetUS$/KM2

Mean AreaProtected

Per CapitaIncome

Large protected areas(mean area > 100 km2)ParastatalBahamas Bahamas National Trust 405,531 1,253 324 208.8 11,800StateDominican Republic Directorate of National Parks 741,036 10,086 73 504.3 1,330Medium protected areas(mean area > 10 km2)ParastatalBonaire (Netherlands Ant.) Bonaire Marine Park 286,714 26 11,027 26.0 8,956Saba (Netherlands Antilles) Saba Marine Park 103,090 10 10,309 10.0 8,956Total 389,804 36 10,828 18.0 8,956StateTurks & Caicos Dept. Enviro. & Coastal Resources 116,850 519 225 15.7 5,000Dominica Forestry and Wildlife Division 662,505 168 3,943 42.0 2,800Jamaica Natural Resources Conservation Auth. 191,830 803 239 89.2 1,540Trinidad & Tobago Wildlife Section (Forestry Div.) 18,676 269 69 17.9 3,740St. Kitts & Nevis Conservation Commission 115,456 26 4,441 13.0 4,760Total 1,105,317 1,785 619 29.3 3,568Small protected areas(mean area < 10 km2)ParastatalAntigua National Parks Authority 962,963 24 40,123 4.0 6,770Barbados Folkestone Marine Park 135,352 3 50,130 2.7 6,560Montserrat Montserrat National Trust 43,847 8 5,220 2.1 3,900St. Lucia St. Lucia National Trust 560,752 0.3 1,678,899 0.1 3,130Total 1,702,914 35 48,059 2.5 5,090StateBermuda Dept. Ag, Fisheries and Parks 10,007,420 111 90,157 1.1 17,790Caribbean SummaryParastatal total 2,498,250 1,324 1,886 60.2 7,153State total 11,853,773 11,982 989 64.4 5,280

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Table 2 Protected area budgets in AfricaCountry Agency Budget

(US$96)Protected

Area (KM2)Budget

US$/KM2Mean AreaProtected

Per CapitaIncome

Lower incomeParastatalTanzania Tanzania National Parks Association 6,865,081 40,300 170 3,358 140StateEthiopia Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Org. 2,010,326 32,403 62 2,315 100Zaire Institute of Zairian Nature Conservation 439,451 100,262 4 5,898 NASudan Wildlife and National Park Forces 1,087,600 93,467 12 6,676 NATotal 3,537,378 16 5,025 100Intermediate incomeParastatalKenya Kenya Wildlife Service 10,159,569 32,726 310 839 250StateUganda Uganda National Parks 388,496 8,336 47 1,389 190Zambia National Parks and Wildlife Service 1,818,198 80,740 23 1,468 350Malawi Dept. National Parks, Wildlife, Tourism 730,684 10,585 69 1,176 170Total 2,937,379 29 1,424 237Higher incomeParastatalSouth Africa National Parks Board 46,275,329 34,244 1,351 2,140 3,040Zimbabwe Dept of Nat. Parks & Wildlife Mgmt 13,104,074 30,089 436 1,433 500Total 59,379,403 64,333 923 1,739 1,770StateBotswana Dept of Wildlife and National Parks 5,590,133 100,250 56 11,139 2,800Namibia Ministry of Environment and Tourism 8,562,095 112,159 76 5,608 1,970Total 67 7,324 2,385

Africa SummaryParastatals total 76,404,053 137,359 556 1,561 983State total 20,626,985 538,202 38 3,738 930

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F i g u r e 2 Caribbean protected area budgets

324

10828

48059

188673 619

90157

9890

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

70000

80000

90000

100000

large areas medium areas small areas mean

budget per square kilometre (1996 US$)

parastatal

state

F i g u r e 3 African protected area budgets

170

310

923

556

16 2967

38

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

lower income interm ediate income higher income mean

budget per square kilometre (1996 US$)

parastatal

state

F i g u r e 1 Protected area budgets, regional means

2'838

2'0331'923

1'0431'032

559 433 331 257 100 74 230

500

1'000

1'500

2'000

2'500

3'000

Pacific

Europe

North America

Caribbean

Australia/New Zealand

Central America

South-East Asia

South Asia

Africa (East & South)

South America

North Africa/Middle East

Africa (West & Central)

S o u r c e : J a m e s , A . , G r e e n , M . a n d P a i n e , J . ( 1 9 9 9 ) A G l o b a l R e v i e w o f P r o t e c t e d

A r e a B u d g e t s a n d S t a f f ( C a m b r i d g e : W C M C ) .

budget in 1996 US$ per square kilometre

338

205

Caring for the Assets — the Effectiveness of Protected AreasManagement

Adrian Phillips

AbstractThe number of protected areas in the world has grown to over 44,000, covering in all more than thecombined areas of India and China. There is certainly a need to create new protected areas in certaincountries and in certain biomes. However, the gap between the aspiration behind protected areas andthe reality of their management is often embarrassingly wide, so protected areas establishment nowneeds to be reinforced by a comparable effort to improve the management of protected areas. Theinvestment already made in protection is at risk if protected areas are not properly managed; on theother hand, the case for new protected areas is greatly strengthened if it is clear that such areas areindeed effectively managed to achieve their objectives. Decision makers, donors, campaigningconservationists, the managers themselves and others all need to know more about the standards ofmanagement The kind of questions that are being asked - and to which this paper offers somepreliminary answers - are: What is the current situation worldwide with protected areas? What threatsand problems do they face? What is the role of evaluation in protected area management? How isevaluation related to investment in, and the values of, protected areas? Is it the sites or the systems thatshould be assessed? What questions should be asked and how should the answers be used?

Adrian PhillipsChair IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas2 The Old RectoryDumbleton near Evesham WR11 6TGUNITED KINGDOMemail: adrianp@wcpa.demon.co.uk

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Caring for the Assets — the Effectiveness of Protected AreasManagement

Adrian Phillips

The current state of play with protected areas: history and quantitativesummary

Protected areas have a long history. Communities in some parts of the world hold to ancient traditionsof setting aside important areas to safeguard the natural resources which they contain; and kings andother rulers have for centuries protected certain areas as hunting reserves. The modern model of aprotected area as an expression of public policy goes back to 1872 and the establishment of the world'sfirst national park in Yellowstone, Wyoming, USA.

Protected areas also have a wide geographic distribution: there is at least one such area in nearly everysignificantly sized country, and in many countries there are hundreds. Every few years, the WorldConservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) and the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) ofIUCN publish an up-dated list of the world's protected areas – the so-called "UN List" because itsorigins lie in a resolution of the United Nations (IUCN and WCMC, 1998). The UN List records thatthe number of protected areas has grown, so that their total extent exceeds 9 per cent of the terrestrialarea of the planet, more than the combined area of China and India; however the proportion of themarine environment in protection is estimated at less than 1 per cent. In all, there are estimated to beover 44,000 areas (Blyth, 20001) which currently meet the IUCN definition of a protected area:

An area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biologicaldiversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or othereffective means (IUCN, 1994).

Countries have used many different terms to describe their own protected areas (Green and Paine,1997, estimate that nearly 1,400 different national titles are in use around the world). As a result, thesame term (e.g. "national parks") can mean different things in different countries; and designations withdiffering names are used to describe the same type of protected area. This is one reason why it isdesirable to develop common definitions for the different types, or categories of protected areas (seeBox 1).

Box 1: Why develop an international system for categorizing protected areas?

• to reduce the confusion over the meaning of terms for areas with common management objectives• to improve protected areas management by providing international standards• to help global and regional accounting and comparisons between countries• to demonstrate to governments the full range of protected area values• to encourage the development of national systems of protected areas

IUCN has developed such a classification system through a lengthy process of consultation,culminating in its adoption in 1994 by the IUCN General Assembly. The principle upon which thiscategorization system is based is that protected areas should be classified by reference to the primarypurpose of their management - a critical factor when it comes to considering the assessment ofmanagement effectiveness. The system is based on six management categories (see Box 2):

1 References to "Blyth 2000" relate to updated data from WCMC drawn from the WCMC/WCPAWorld Protected Area data base, and kindly calculated for the author's use in this paper by Simon Blythof the WCMC staff in April 2000.

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Box 2: Protected Area Management Categories

Areas managed mainly for:

I Strict protection (i.e. I(a): strict nature reserve; and I(b): wilderness area)II Ecosystem conservation and recreation (i.e. national park)III Conservation of natural features (i.e. natural monument)IV Conservation through active management (i.e. habitat/species management area)V Landscape/seascape conservation and recreation (i.e. protected landscape/seascape)VI Sustainable use of natural ecosystems (i.e. managed resource protected area).

Source: IUCN 1994

The system is essentially a taxonomy of protected areas. Thus it is not designed as a commentary on theeffectiveness of management, nor is it a measure of threat (akin, say, to the Red List process). Suchadditional descriptions of protected areas need to be developed separately to provide a meaningfulcommentary on the statistical data that is collated by reference to the protected area managementcategories. On the other hand, because the system is based on the objectives of management - and becausethat must be the starting point of any assessment of management effectiveness - the protected areascategories system is a foundation for systematic monitoring of effectiveness. This has indeed beenrecognized in the work developed within WCPA by its task force on management effectiveness, and uponwhich the latter part of this paper draws (Hockings et al., 2000).

The protected area management categories system is of course also helpful in understanding the numberand extent of protected areas of different kinds around the world (see Box 3 (Blyth, 2000)).

Box 3 - Global Statistics on Protected Areas (Blyth, 2000)

PA category Number and % Area (Km2) and %Ia 4,244 (9.6%) 1,002,353 (7.5%)Ib 772 (1.7%) 938,501 (7.1%)II 3,391 (7.7%) 3,998,169 (30.1%)III 5,747 (13.0%) 201,404 (1.5%)IV 21,283 (48.2%) 2,417,599 (18.2%)V 5,891 (13.3%) 1,080,744 (8.1%)VI 2,869 (6.5%) 3,640,357 (27.4%)Total 44,197 13,279,127

Another form of global analysis that can be made is of protected area coverage against major biomes.This is set out in Box 4:

Box 4: Extent of protection of world's major biomes (Blyth, 2000)

Biome % biomeprotected

Biome % biomeprotected

Tropical humid forests 9.12% Cold winter deserts 6.00%Sub-tropical forests 10.33% Tundra communities 20.03%Temperate needle-leaf forests 5.12% Tropical grasslands/savannahs 6.98%Tropical dry forests 7.04% Temperate grasslands 0.98%Temperate broad-leaf forests 3.61% Mixed mountain systems 9.05%Evergreen sclerophyllous forests 4.48% Mixed island systems 14.24%Warm deserts and semi-deserts 4.85% Lake systems 0.61%

The conclusions one might draw from an analysis of the above, and other data from the UN list and theWCMC database, are as follows:

§ after over 100 years of protected area establishment, much has been achieved, and in particularnearly 10 per cent of the earth's terrestrial surface is under some form of protection. But the pattern

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of protection is uneven: in particular some biomes are far better represented than others and somecountries have far better developed protected area systems than others. Even so, it can be claimedthat the world's protected area estate is the most important achievement in environmentalprotection that has been handed from the twentieth century to the twenty-first.

What about the quality?

So far the analysis has been largely quantitative, but of course the true value of a protected areadepends on how successful it is in achieving its stated aims. Inevitably as one moves from statistics tovalue judgements, it becomes harder to draw firm conclusions. Nonetheless, there is ample evidencefrom numerous quarters that many protected areas are falling far short of the expectations placed uponthem. For example:

§ The Nature Conservancy programme, Parks in Peril, looked at nine Neotropical protected areasand concluded that all were vulnerable to at least four, and in some cases up to eight, of thefollowing ten large-scale threats – logging; mining, oil and gas; roads; colonization; agriculturalencroachment; tourism; marine over-use; grazing; policy failures; other (e.g. weak governmentinstitutions, drug trafficking and trans-boundary conflict) (Brandon et al., 1998, pages 404-405)

§ WCMC surveyed expenditure and staffing levels for a number of protected areas in 1993. Theyconcluded that expenditure was less in developing countries than in developed ones more by orderof magnitude (US$2,058 per square kilometre of protected area annually, as against US$157). Inthe case of all developing countries, "budgets were well below actual requirements". Although itshould be added that some developed countries also invest surprisingly little on a per hectare basis– Australia compares broadly with the developing country average, for example. By contrast,developed and developing countries have almost the same ratio of staff numbers per area underprotection (26.9 and 27.6 respectively) – labour comes cheaply in the developing world (James,1999)

§ WCPA undertook a review of protected areas in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific regions forthe European Commission, and concluded that they nearly all faced pressures from localpopulations seeking the means to survive. This was aggravated by commercial exploitation ofnatural resources (e.g. wildlife products), pollution, climate change, and poorly managed tourism.In parts of Africa especially, they also suffer from a lack of political support (EC/IUCN, 1999)

§ A recent report on the ecological integrity of Canada's national parks concluded that most of themare under threat. Of the 37 national parks listed in 1997, 22 were identified as being under major orsevere environmental danger from both external and internal threats (Parks Canada, 2000)

§ The World Bank/WWF Alliance sponsored a survey of ten countries in 1999 to establish baselineknowledge on protected area management effectiveness. It found a recurring picture of threatsfrom encroachment by human settlement, agriculture and over-grazing, forestry operations, miningand fossil fuel extraction (Stolton and Dudley, 1999)

§ A further piece of work for WWF, confirming and extending the above, will be published in timefor the Bangkok conference, under the title "Squandering Paradise: the Importance andVulnerability of the World's Protected Areas" (Carey, Stolton and Dudley, 2000)

§ Some of the papers prepared for the Bangkok conference also illustrate the scale of problemsfacing protected areas. For example, a WWF study showed that 75% of Brazil's federal and otherprotected areas in Categories I and II may be at risk (de Sa, Bensusan and Ferreira, 2000)

§ Even the "crown jewels" among protected areas, World Heritage sites, are not immune. Of the 128natural sites currently on the World Heritage list, 18 are also on that of World Heritage in Danger.

The above list of examples could be much longer, of course, but it shows that in many countries -including wealthy ones like Canada - there is a gap (sometimes a yawning gap) between the rhetoric ofprotected areas and the reality. The term "paper parks" has been used to describe the condition whereprotected areas exist on paper, but not in reality. It is this fact above all others that drives the currentinterest in ways of assessing and improving the effectiveness of protected areas and of theirmanagement.

Threats, underlying causes and protected area effectiveness

209

It is important first to clarify the meaning of these terms: threat, underlying causes and protected areaeffectiveness; and how they relate to each other.

A threat is defined here as an external factor that presents an existing, or potential, danger to theachievement of protected area aims; a number of attempts have been made to categorize these (e.g.Brandon et al., 1998; Stolton and Dudley, 1999). Some threats may be within the capacity of theprotected area manager to deal with (poaching or encroachment for example). But this is not always thecase, and there are other kinds of threats, such as long range pollution, where the protected areamanager can do very little on his or her own since they are symptomatic of a wider problem.

Threats often arise because of underlying causes of a socio-economic, cultural or political nature.These are all pervading influences, such as over-consumption, poverty, demographic pressures,patterns of trade and debt, and other factors, all of which play a part in putting pressures on protectedareas. Many ecological threats – e.g. those from invasive species – have a human origin. Others that wehave thought of as "natural" in the past, such as extreme climatic events, may also be anthropogenic inorigin, consequent on climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels etc. The socio-economic,cultural and political forces are the "drivers" behind the threats, and as such affect the ability ofprotected areas to achieve their objectives.

The effectiveness of protected areas is concerned with measuring how well protected areas meet theirconservation objectives, e.g. as indicated in the protected area management category to which they areassigned. Three questions arise in this respect (Hockings et al., 2000), relating to:

§ the design of the protected area site and system (e.g. are the individual protected areas and thewhole protected area system well designed to achieve conservation aims?)

§ the appropriateness of management systems and processes (e.g. how well is managementresponding to the challenges? Is there enough management, and are the management actionsappropriate?)

§ the delivery of protected area objectives (e.g. how well do individual protected areas, and theentire protected area system, achieve their objectives, in both biological and social terms?).

Failures in protected area effectiveness will show up in a number of ways. Box 5 combines a list oftypical evidence of shortcomings in management effectiveness with the main examples of threats andunderlying causes.

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Box 5: Threats, Causes and Management Effectiveness (adapted from Stolton and Dudley) [N.B.these are three separate lists, and are not intended to be read across]

Threats to protected areas Underlying causes Evidence of weakmanagement

§ Encroachment by humansettlements

§ Agriculture and over-grazing

§ Forestry operations§ Excessive use of NTFPs§ Mining and fossil fuel

extraction§ Tourism and recreation§ Infrastructure (dams, roads,

power lines, etc.)§ Bushmeat hunting§ Collection of exotic species

for sale§ Fire§ Pollution§ Climate change§ Invasive species§ War, civil unrest

§ International debt and flowof resources from poor torich

§ Pressure for trade anddevelopment

§ Land tenure and relatedissues

§ Demographic pressures§ Social and gender issues§ Corruption and poor

governance§ Inequality within and

between countries§ Marginalization of

indigenous peoples§ Lack of capacity§ Lack of education§ National and ethnic

tensions

§ Lack of money§ Lack of staff§ Lack of staff training§ Lack of political support§ Poor communication with

local people§ Little involvement of local

people in PA management§ Poor coordination between

government departmentsimpacting PAs.

§ Weak legal framework§ Lack of management plans§ Lack of regional planning

framework§ Poorly defined boundaries

While threats make the task of management of protected areas more difficult, the underlying causes canalso affect the ability of management to deal with these challenges. In other words, managementeffectiveness in particular can be seen as affected by both threats and underlying causes. Therelationship between these concepts can be expressed diagrammatically thus:

Threats to protected areas ---------------------- ðð Management effectiveness ññ ññ

ññ ----------------Underlying causes --------------ññ

Looking to the future, we can expect that the pressures on protected areas arising from underlyingcauses will grow. Rising human population, increased demands for terrestrial freshwater and marinenatural resources of all kinds, growing problems of many forms of pollution, the impacts of climatechange, the worldwide growth of tourism, and the effects of invasive species will compound an alreadyserious situation facing protected areas in many countries. Social, economic and - it seems - ethnicstrains will face many societies and add to the problems of protected area management. The result willbe greater fragmentation and degradation of natural habitats and an inevitable further loss ofbiodiversity.

This will affect protected areas like the rest of the landscape, but at the same time it will add to theirsignificance as an insurance policy against environmental degradation; protected areas will be morevaluable to societies in future than in the past. In the light of such prospects, it is certain that theimportance of protected area management will grow and so will the need to assess the quality of thatmanagement.

What is the role of evaluation of protected areas management?

Even though parks and reserves contain a wealth of natural heritage, protected areas are, of course,artificial constructs. They are the result of actions by people (governments at all levels, communities,NGOs, and/or the private sector), involving:

§ political commitment and leadership to create protected areas

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§ (usually) a legislative decision to enable them to be brought into being§ administrative action to establish individual protected areas§ a commitment of resources of money and staff to make it a reality.

What is often missing, but no less important, is a framework of monitoring and evaluation to ensurethat the aims of any general protected areas legislation, and of the individual protected areasthemselves, are achieved. It is because protected areas are an expression of public policy - this is partlytrue even if they are run by the private sector or NGOs - that there is such a pressing need to ensure thatthey achieve their stated aims. This requires monitoring to find out what is happening in and around theprotected areas; and evaluation to assess the results of monitoring and determine how the protected areashould be managed in future. Evaluation is so important because protected areas represent a largeinvestment, and are of growing value to society.

Investment in protected areas and the effectiveness of their management

In general, protected areas represent a significant investment of the following resources:

§ land and water§ money§ skills and knowledge§ political reputation

As already noted, some nine to ten per cent of land is in some form of protected area. Particularly incountries where there is pressure on land resources, it is inevitable that people will ask if the protectedareas represent value for money. Clear demonstration that they are in fact achieving their purposes maynot reconcile everyone to the existence of protected areas, but it will blunt the criticisms - and on, theother hand, if protected areas fail to achieve their intended aims, or are ineffective, public opinion maybe less supportive and decision makers less willing to fund them. At the local level, the monitoring andevaluation should look at the social, as well as the biodiversity, impacts of the protected areas. Suchassessments can be used to help correct problems that have arisen with the local community and soimprove the prospects for local support (see also the following section on protected area values andmanagement effectiveness).

Protected areas cost money. In most countries they are a direct charge on the exchequer, albeit often adisappointingly small one. They may also represent a significant opportunity cost, since more"profitable" uses of the area will have had to be foregone. Protected areas are also often the recipientsof various aid channels, such as the GEF, government-to-government bilateral assistance programmes,NGO support (sometimes via debt-for-nature swaps), and increasingly a channel for private investmentas well (IUCN, in print). The pressure is on protected area managers to demonstrate value for moneyand to show that these natural assets are being managed efficiently, effectively, and economically.Increasingly, they are being expected to adopt a "business" approach to management. With someprotected area managers now responsible for budgets of several million dollars secured from manysources, with a real estate of thousands of hectares, a staff of several hundred employees, and visitornumbers in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, they are in effect running medium-sized businessoperations. The assessment of management effectiveness should be a normal part of operating such anenterprise.

Protected areas also represent a large intellectual investment, often going back over many years inscientific knowledge accumulated over time, and in the skills of the many people engaged inmanagement. Some of that knowledge is held in the community – traditional awareness of the potentialapplication of plants in medicines, for example. It is important that those managing protected areas beable to demonstrate that this traditional store-house of knowledge is recognized and used in day-to-dayoperations in the protected area; and to ensure that the more conventional professional skills of theirown staff are also valued.

Finally, protected areas represent an investment in political reputation. Many individual areas, andsome protected area systems, have been developed as an act of political courage or far-seeingleadership. It is particularly important that protected areas established in this way are not discredited bya failure to achieve their purposes, because public support will then be eroded. By providing theprotected area manager with the means to learn from experience, (whether in terms of biodiversity

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protection, working with the local community or business aspects), and to take quick remedial action,the regular assessment of management effectiveness can safeguard the standing of protected areas inthe public mind. The key point is this: such positive demonstrations of efficient management, and ofspeedy responsiveness to concerns, can help to retain the standing of protected areas in the public mind,and hence secure support for more protected areas to be set up in future.

The values of protected areas and the effectiveness of their management

The above argument rests primarily on the idea that protected areas represent an investment that mustnot be squandered. But another way of looking at them is as a set of values which need to bemaximized (see Box 6).

Box 6: The Main Values of Protected Areas

Biodiversity conservation Local amenityWatershed protection NTFPs (non-timber forest products)Flood and storm mitigation Soil conservationTourism and the local economy CO2 sequestrationCultural and non-material values Research and education

There is much evidence that the value of the many services that protected areas render to society hasbeen growing in recent years, and in particular through the "ecosystem services" which they provide.For example, over the past year or so, protected forests in Meso-America and Venezuela helped toreduce the violent run-off and flooding in parts of these areas; they saved lives and money. Or again, asurprisingly large number of cities depend on nearby protected areas for at least part of their watersupply (see Box 7). With climate change, such ecosystem service values are certain to increase infuture.

Box 7: Some cities that receive water from nearby protected areas

Quito, Ecuador Manchester, UKTegucigalpa , Honduras Freetown, Sie rra LeoneSan Juan, Puerto Rico Cape Town, South AfricaNew York and Los Angeles, USA Mumbai (Bombay), IndiaCalgary, Canada Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, AustraliaDar es Salaam, Tanzania

Another value of protected areas, which is being increasingly recognized, is their potential function asthe engines of the rural economy. Examples are numerous: many of South Africa's parks and reservesbring jobs and income to otherwise very poor communities; the tourist appeal of the wolves of theAbruzzo National Park, Italy, is helping to revive a regionally depressed economy; Australia's federallyrun parks generate some two billion Australian dollars annually in tourist activity – and so forth(IUCN, 1998).

And there are other unquantified, and perhaps unquantifiable, values to do with national pride andcultural identity. Canadians, for example, rank their national parks well above the national anthem, theRoyal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and ice hockey as symbols ofnational identity and pride, alongside the National Health Service and the Charter of Rights (ParksCanada, 2000). The recognition of the cultural significance of places like Uluru Kata Tjuta (AyersRock) in Australia is growing as modern Australians become more alive to the importance of thecultural heritage of the Aboriginal peoples.

Two conclusions follow:

§ The various values of protected areas need to be understood and assessed as a basis for the exerciseof improving management effectiveness. There is now a growing volume of advice on how to dothis and in particular how to assess the economic benefits that protected areas can bring to regionaland national economies (e.g. IUCN, 1998)

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§ The assessment of the effectiveness of protected areas, and of their management, is needed toassure people that these areas are indeed fulfilling their potential value to the broader community,and are being well managed for that purpose.

At what levels should management be assessed?

While most interest is usually focused on the site level, it is important to stress thatprotected area management can, and should, be assessed at the system level as well(see Box 8). System type assessments may often need to be informed by site levelanalysis. In all cases, the evaluation of management effectiveness pre-supposes theexistence of a "manager", be it an individual or an institution, although the assessmentitself should be designed to involve as many of the stakeholders as possible.

"Sites", of course, are individual protected areas or management units. They are the sites, for example,listed in the UN List. In most cases, the protected area will have a designated manager, even if he orshe is also assigned other units to manage as well. Often the manager is a field staff member of anational or provincial service for protected areas, or of an NGO or private body running the park.Sometimes he or she is a professional working to an elected or nominated board with ultimateresponsibility for the site. In the case of community-owned protected areas, the manager will be thecommunity itself.

"Systems" may be national, regional or worldwide. For example, a national system would be a nationalpark service, or a system of protected areas as understood by Article 8 of the CBD. A regional systemwould be a regional programme for protected areas (as is being developed with Natura 2000 in theEuropean Union). A worldwide system would be a global convention or programme (notably theWorld Heritage and Ramsar Conventions and the Man and Biosphere Programme's network ofBiosphere Reserves).

Box 8: Levels of protected area assessment

Type of protected areas assessment Examples of "Managers"

Site level § Protected area manager§ Protected area authority

System level:

§ National

§ Regional

§ Global

§ Board and CEO of National Parkservice

§ Ministry of the Environment (e.g. fora "system" as per Article 8 of CBD)

§ European Commission (Natura 2000)

§ WH Committee (WH Sites)§ Ramsar Committee (Ramsar sites)§ MAB Council (Biosphere Reserves)

What questions should be asked?

The key to effective evaluation is to ask the right questions. There has, in recent years, been a moveaway from just asking questions relating to how resources were deployed, how effectively a projectwas undertaken and what has happened, towards the deeper question: did the project achieve itsobjectives?

This is an apparently simple question but, in fact, asking it reveals the need to address some morefundamental issues, such as:

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§ What are the objectives?§ Have they been defined with sufficient clarity to assess progress against them?§ Who has defined these objectives?§ Are there multiple and conflicting objectives?§ Who should make the assessment?§ What constitutes success?

The work done by the WCPA protected area management effectiveness task force helps to address suchquestions in a systematic way and provides a suggested framework for assessing managementeffectiveness in future. Such issues are outside the scope of this paper, but will be considered at thisconference (after which the task force's recommendations will be published in theIUCN/WCPA/Cardiff University best practice management guidelines series).

As to the subject matter to be assessed in the monitoring and evaluation of protected area managementeffectiveness, this is likely to be of three broad kinds:

§ biodiversity-related§ socially-related§ business-related

Biodiversity-related is the assessment of management in terms of the impact on biodiversity, naturalresources, landscapes, etc, and on the other natural values for which the protected area has been set up.Socially related questions are those concerning the interaction with local people, and how they respondto, and are affected by the protected areas. Business-related questions are those which address matterslike financial and staff resources, the adequacy of plans and legal framework, etc. All these matters willalso be further developed in the work of the WCPA protected area management effectiveness taskforce.

An important point to stress is that management effectiveness is contextual – but so is the ability toevaluate. Thus one cannot expect that managers in many poorer countries can bring to bear the samedegree of sophistication in the management of protected areas as is possible in wealthier parts of theworld. An example relates to the measurement and reporting of public use of protected areas. A recentIUCN/WCPA publication (Hornback and Eagles, 1999) reviews the use of electronic equipment tocount the number of visitors: magnetic detectors, seismic detectors, and optical sensors for example.Though these are highly appropriate to parks in the US, Canada or Australia for example, they wouldbe wholly out of place in many African, Asian or Latin American protected areas. This is, in fact,recognized in the tourism guidelines which suggest simpler techniques as an alternative.

So there is certainly a need to approach the assessment of management effectiveness in general in avery flexible way if it is to work in all countries. On the other hand, if there is not an element ofconsistency between separate evaluations, the opportunity to draw inter-site and inter-countrycomparison will be lost. The answer seems to be to develop a framework, which is capable ofadaptation to a range of different contextual situations, from simple "rule of thumb" approaches tohighly sophisticated methods where these are appropriate. The WCPA task force is working towardssuch a framework, which will be recommended later this year in the guidelines from IUCN.

How should the outcome of assessing management effectiveness be used?

There are a number of groups who have a particular interest in the monitoring and evaluation exercise:

§ managers will be interested in order to improve the quality of their management (adaptivemanagement) or to report to their senior managers or donors (accountability)

§ decision makers, funders and lobbyists will be interested in the results in order to highlightproblems and set priorities for action, whether at the site or agency level

§ local communities and other stakeholders will be interested to see how far their interests are in facttaken into account.

The results of assessing management effectiveness can be used in many ways, but the four principalareas are:

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§ in promoting adaptive management, so that the manager learns from experience and improvesmanagement. This may involve anything from fine tuning to a fundamental reappraisal ofmanagement objectives for the area in question.

§ in promoting accountability, not only in the relatively narrow area of finance and staffing but alsoin terms more broadly of management performance and effectiveness. Although accountability is areason for measuring management effectiveness, a monitoring and evaluation system should not beseen primarily as an externally-driven form of inspection with the aim of regulating (or evenpunishing) the manager. Rather it should be conceived of as a circular exercise, which is designedwith input from the manager, and which is intended to assist the manager to understand better theresults of his or her actions and thus to improve the quality of future management.

§ in improving programme planning, since experience derived from the site level can be drawn on toimprove the quality of programme planning in future. In effect the protected area or protected areasystem that is evaluated becomes a "pilot" from which lessons can be learned in future.Monitoring, evaluation, planning, and management should be conceived of as an iterative or"circular" process, informed by experience.

§ in communications and public relations with the stakeholders, so that they can see the benefits thatprotected areas bring, and the responsiveness of the manager to problems that are identified.

Conclusions

Protected areas are, in many ways, a great success story and reflect the high ideals of societies aroundthe world. It is important to recall what has been achieved in the past century as well as to highlight themany dangers that protected areas now face.

But the future of protected areas can no longer depend – if it ever did – on well meaning enthusiasmand the belief that the self-evident goodness of the cause will produce the resources and politicalcommitment needed to ensure their survival. The world is now much more strongly driven by "businessvalues" than it was, and protected areas cannot be immune from this trend.

So while there is every reason to expect that the values placed on protected areas in future will be evenhigher than they are now, these special places will find themselves in an increasingly competitiveenvironment. Competition will be for the funds they require, and for the natural resources that they areset up to protect. To succeed, therefore, they will need stronger public and political support than theyhave received in the past. This, in turn, means that protected areas must demonstrate that they are wellrun, and do indeed deliver to society their many potential benefits in an efficient, effective andeconomic way. Caring for these assets in the twenty-first century will demand that we have a farsharper grip on protected area management than has been the case previously.

References

Brandon K et al, 1998: Parks in Peril, The Island Press, Washington

Carey C., Stolton S. and Dudley N, 2000: Squandering Paradise: the Importance and Vulnerability ofthe World's Protected Areas, WWF, Gland, Switzerland

Lemos de Sá R., Bensusan N. and Ferreira L. 2000: NGO and protected area management agenciesworking together to assess protected areas effectiveness: successes, problems and prospects – theexperience of WWF in Brazil, The Design and Management of Forest Protected Areas, WWF, Gland,Switzerland

EC/IUCN, 1999: Parks for Biodiversity, IUCN, Cambridge, UK

Green M. and Paine J. 1997: State of the World 's Protected Areas at the end of the Twentieth Century,(unpublished but available on the WCMC web site)

Hockings M. et al 2000: Evaluating Effectiveness - A Framework for Assessing Management of ProtectedAreas, The Design and Management of Forest Protected Areas, WWF, Gland, Switzerland

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Hornback and Eagles, 1999: Guidelines for Public Use Measurement and Reporting at Parks andProtected Areas, IUCN, Cambridge, UK

James A 1999: Institutional Constraints to Protected Area Funding, PARKS, vol. 9, no.2.

IUCN and WCMC, 1998: 1997 UN List of Protected Areas, IUCN, Cambridge, UK

IUCN, 1994: Guidelines for Protected Areas Management Categories, IUCN, Cambridge, UK

IUCN 1998: Economic Values of Protected Areas - Guidelines, IUCN, Cambridge, UK

IUCN, in print: Financing Protected Areas - Guidelines, IUCN, Cambridge, UK

Parks Canada, 2000 Ecological Integrity of Canada's National Parks Parks Canada, Parks Canada,Ottawa, Canada

Stolton S. and Dudley N. 1999, A preliminary survey of management status and threats in forestprotected areas, PARKS, vol. 9, no.2.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the following for commenting on the draft and/or providing additional information:Javier Beltran, Simon Blyth, Nigel Dudley, Jerry Harrison Marc Hockings, Bing Lucas, DavidSheppard and Sue Stolton

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The WCPA Management Effectiveness Framework – Where to fromhere?

Marc Hockings, Nigel Dudley* and Sue Stolton*

AbstractThe emergence of new challenges and opportunities is forcing a fundamentalreassessment of protected area management. To maximize the potential of protectedareas we need to understand strengths and weaknesses in their management. A WCPATask Force is developing a framework for assessing management effectiveness ofprotected areas and protected area systems. The draft framework is presented andsome recent modifications are highlighted, including greater emphasis on context(such as significance of and threats to protected areas) and ways of reporting results.We also present some challenges for the future including: (i) using the tools as acontribution to improving protected areas through field projects; (ii) training in thetechniques used to carry out assessment (iii) promotion to governments, developmentagencies and PA agencies; (iv) development of criteria and indicators for marineprotected areas; (v) policy development including assessing future options includingthe possible use of assessment in verification or certification systems; and (vi)development of key institutional partners.

Marc HockingsSenior Lecturer, Natural Systems & Wildlife ManagementUniversity of QueenslandGatton QLD 4343AUSTRALIAemail: hockings@uqg.uq.edu.au

* Sue Stolton & Nigel DudleyEquilibrium Consultants, UKemail: equilibrium@compuserve.com

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The WCPA Management Effectiveness Framework – Where to fromhere?

Marc Hockings, Nigel Dudley* and Sue Stolton*

Throughout the world, the emergence of new challenges and opportunities are forcing a fundamentalreassessment of protected area management. Putting time and effort into the selection and designationof protected areas only makes sense if there is a reasonable chance that the areas can be secured for theforeseeable future. Unfortunately, this is often not the case today. There is a growing recognition thatmany protected areas are being degraded and destroyed. Degradation comes in many forms, includingpoaching (of wildlife, fish, timber and other resources), illegal mining, encroachment by settlers, over-use by tourists and the development of infrastructure such as roads and dams. Sometimes localopposition to protected areas contributes to their loss. Even when protected areas are free fromimmediate threats, longer term changes brought about through air and water pollution and globalclimate change are affecting areas that have been set aside for their important ecological characteristics.

The seriousness of the challenges facing protected areas has forced a fundamental rethink aboutprotected area design and management. One important element in this is the recognition of the need forfar better knowledge about the status and management effectiveness of protected areas. Indeed, It isremarkable to realize how little we know about the status of many protected areas – far less than weusually know, for example, about the health of agricultural land or the viability of fish stocks. This ismore than just of academic interest. What little we do know suggests that many protected areas are notin particularly good shape, suffering from a variety of threats and in some cases in danger of losing thevery values for which they were set aside in the first place. Others exist in name only – the so-called“paper parks” that exist as lines on the map but have never actually been implemented. There istherefore clearly a need for better systems for assessing the management effectiveness of protectedareas, to provide information for managers themselves, for NGOs, governments, donor agencies andcivil society.

The World Commission on Protected Areas set up a Management Effectiveness Task Force to look intothese issues and prepare proposals for how protected area management might be better assessed. Thispaper draws together the results of five years effort by specialists around the world. It is based on initialwork carried out at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, UK, and on a series ofworkshops and meetings held in association with IUCN, WWF, the World Bank and the WorldHeritage Convention in the UK, Costa Rica and Australia. We have also been able to draw uponresearch and expertise built up by members of the Task Force and others who have developedassessment systems in Central America, Brazil, Peru, Australia, Cameroon, Gabon, India, and withbodies such as WWF and the World Bank.

The proposed frameworkThe framework developed in 1997 has now been revised to incorporate lessons learnt through theworkshops and case studies. We recognize that different situations and needs require different levels ofassessment, different approaches and different emphasis. The following framework is therefore not astraitjacket, but an overview that helps in the design of systems, provides a checklist of issues that needto be measured and suggests some useful indicators.

The process of management starts with establishing a vision, planning and allocation of resources and,through management actions, produces goods and services. The type of management used is influencedby issues such as the biological and cultural significance of the protected area and the threats that itfaces. Monitoring and evaluation provide the link that enables planners and managers to learn fromexperience and helps governments, funding agencies and civil society to monitor the effectiveness ofprotected area networks. Assessment should ideally look at all aspects of the management cycle,including the context within which management takes place. It requires both monitoring and evaluationat various stages, each with a different type and focus of the assessment. Figure 1 presents a commonframework within which evaluation and monitoring programmes can be established, combiningcontext, planning, input, processes, outputs and outcomes.

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Figure 1: The Management Cycle

The elements to be measuredThe following section provides a brief description of each of these elements and explains why they areimportant.

Design issues relating to both individual sites and to protected area systemsContext - Where are we now? The protected area’s current status and importanceand the threats and opportunities that are affecting it; this is not an analysis ofmanagement, but provides information that helps put management decisions intocontext. Where assessment is being used to identify management priorities withina protected area network this may be the main part of the assessment required.It also helps to provide information about management focus.

Planning - Where do we want to be? The appropriateness of national protected area policies, plans forprotected area systems, the design of individual protected areas and plans for their management. Theindicators chosen here will depend on the purpose of assessment and particularly whether it is lookingat a system of reserves or an individual protected area. In the former case, issues of ecologicalrepresentativeness and connectivity will be particularly important while the focus of assessment ofindividual protected areas will include shape, size, location and detailed management plans.

Appropriateness of management systems and processesInput and process – what do we need and how do we go about it? The adequacy of resources and thestandards of management systems, based on data about resources and management processes. Inputsgenerally include a measure of staff, funds, equipment, facilities required at either agency or site level.

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The adequacy of management processes can be assessed through issues such as day-to-daymaintenance through to the adequacy of approaches to local communities.

Delivery of protected area objectivesOutput and outcome – what were the results and what did we achieve . Whether management hasreached the targets and objectives established through a management plan, national plans andultimately the aims of the IUCN category of the protected area. Output evaluation considers what hasbeen done by management and examines the extent to which specific targets, work programmes orplans have been implemented. Approaches to outcome evaluation involve long-term monitoring of thecondition of the biological and cultural resources of the site/system, socio-economic aspects of use andimpacts of the site/system’s management on local communities. To some extent measurement ofoutputs focuses on the quantity of management achievements while outcomes focus on the quality ofmanagement in terms of the overall objectives.

Evaluating management effectivenessIdeally, systems for assessing management effectiveness of protected areas will incorporatecomponents that cover each of the elements of evaluation outlined above. Because each type ofevaluation has a different focus, they are complementary rather than alternative approaches toevaluating management effectiveness. Time series data for both inputs and outputs within a protectedarea or system can be particularly valuable in assessing changes in the efficiency of management andmay enable a judgement to be made about the effectiveness of a change in the processes used incarrying out a particular activity. However, assessments will be driven by particular needs and that apartial evaluation can still provide very useful information.

In Table 1, the framework is summarized in table form.

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Table 1Framework for assessing management effectiveness of protected areas and protected area systems

Elements ofevaluation

Context Planning Input Process Output Outcome

Explanation Where are wenow?

Assessment ofimportance, threatsand policyenvironment

Where do we wantto be?

Assessment of PAdesign and planning

What do we need?

Assessment ofresources needed tocarry outmanagement

How do we go aboutit?

Assessment of way inwhich management isconducted.

What were theresults?

An assessment ofthe quantity ofachievements

What did weachieve?

An assessment ofthe quality ofachievements

Criteria that areassessed

Significance

Threats

Vulnerability

National policy

Protected arealegislation andpolicy

Protected areasystem design

Reserve design

Managementplanning

Resourcing of agency

Resourcing of site

Partners

Suitability ofmanagement processes

Results ofmanagementactions

Services andproducts

Impacts: effects ofmanagement inrelation to objectives

Focus ofevaluation

Status Appropriateness Economy Efficiency Effectiveness EffectivenessAppropriateness

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Recent developments in the proposed frameworkSince the framework was first proposed, greater emphasis has been placed on the importance ofproviding information about the context of protected areas (how important they and why, and theircurrent status) and on the threats they face. These elements help particularly when assessment is beingused on a system-wide approach or to decide where best to allocate limited resources – a commonchallenge for virtually all protected area agencies and managers.

What level of assessment is needed?The framework can be applied at different levels depending on circumstances, resources and needs.Three broad levels of monitoring and evaluation are proposed (Figure 2). Deciding on how much timeand effort to spend is the first stage in any assessment and the detailed framework contains amethodology for helping planners and managers to make this decision.

• Level 1 requires little or no additional data collection but uses available data to assess the contextof the protected area network or individual site along with the appropriateness of planning, inputs,processes of management. It may include limited assessment of outputs.

• Level 2 combines the approach taken in Level 1 with restricted additional assessment of outputsand outcomes of management.

• Level 3 emphasizes monitoring the extent of achievement of management objectives throughfocussing on outputs and outcomes while retaining measures of management context, planning,inputs and processes. Level 3 assessments are directed mainly at site level.

Figure 2: Levels of monitoring and evaluation

A project’s objectives will often determine the level at which the framework is applied. For example,an NGO reviewing a national protected area system for advocacy purposes is more likely to use a level1 assessment, whereas protected area authorities trying to establish the effectiveness of individual siteswould usually be better served by a level 3 assessment.

Into the futureThe Task Force is well advanced towards completing the framework3. This is not anacademic exercise. Whether or not the framework is worth the effort put into it willdepend entirely on whether it is useful – and it is used – to improve management onthe ground. In the final part of this paper we therefore offer some preliminarythoughts about priorities for the next two to three years – which in turn lead into someof the issues being discussed in the workshops.

Priority 1: Using the tools – implementation of management effectiveness assessment as acontribution to improving protected areas through field projects. It is proposed that the TaskForce work with existing projects – including the periodic reporting of World Heritage Sites

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Context Planning Inputs Processes Outputs Outcomes

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and projects associated with the WWF/World Bank Alliance target on managementeffectiveness – to use assessment at a variety of levels as part of a wider process of improvingmanagement. We aim to be able to present a detailed report on lessons learned at the 2003World Parks Congress and to continue this development through the lifetime of the Alliancetarget and beyond.

Priority 2: Training – about both the importance of assessing management effectiveness andthe techniques used to carry out assessment. At the moment, only a few enthusiasts orspecialists understand assessment systems; there is an urgent need to communicate skills andexpertise. It is proposed that the Task Force work with existing institutions to train trainersduring 2001 and 2002, drawing on experience in Central America where a similar exercisehas already been undertaken by the IUCN/WWF Forest Innovations project. This will includerunning a trainers’ workshop in one region, hopefully in association with GTZ, the WildlifeTraining College and others. The development of teaching modules will be an important partof this focus and will also enable information to spread out to other training institutions. It isaimed to have a global network of professionals trained in use of assessment methods by2002.

Promotion – spreading the word to governments, development agencies and PA agencies. At the sametime, the message about both the importance of management effectiveness in protected areas, andapproaches to its assessment, need to be disseminated amongst those most likely to make used of theknowledge. The publication of the Best Practice Guidelines document3 as part of the IUCN/CardiffUniversity series is a major step in this direction. It is also proposed to use existing initiatives topromote assessment (e.g. the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests and the Convention on BiologicalDiversity) and to run workshops aimed specifically at major governmental and NGO developmentagencies. Our aim is to have key governments and development agencies adopt assessment systems bythe time of the 2003 World Parks Congress.

Technical development – development of criteria and indicators for marine protected areas. Althoughgood progress has been made in terrestrial protected areas, there is still an urgent need for developmentand testing of assessment systems in marine areas. It is proposed that the Task Force collaborate withothers, including the marine programmes at WWF and IUCN, and partners such as the Great BarrierReef Marine Authority and the National Oceanographic and Aeronautical Administration to developassessment systems.

Policy development – assessing future options including the possible use of assessment in verificationor certification systems. It is clear that there is interest in developing assessment systems suitable forstandard setting or certification – for example the Pan Parks initiative currently taking place in Europe.This is a more controversial development; the Task Force intends to work with WWF and others toexamine options for using assessment within verification and certification schemes, through a smallworking group and to bring proposals to the 2003 World Parks Congress.

Key institutional partners – these issues are too large for one organization to work on alone, and wehave emphasized the importance of partnerships throughout this paper. One important aim for the nextfew years is to develop good working relationships with existing partners, such as IUCN, WWF, TheWorld Bank, World Heritage Convention, GTZ, USAID, CIDA, government of Australia and others,and to develop new partnerships. This conference is an excellent place to start.

AcknowledgementsWe would like to thanks all those who have commented on the earlier drafts of this framework,including particularly members of the Management Effectiveness Task Force and delegates atworkshops in Turrialba Costa Rica and The Broads, England. We would also like to thank the WorldBank/WWF Alliance and the WWF Forests for Life campaign for sponsoring the revision of theframework.

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Managing and Applying Information on Protected Area ManagementEffectiveness at Global and Regional Levels: The Role of WCMC and WCPA

Jeremy Harrison and Marc Hockings1

AbstractInformation about the effectiveness of management of protected areas is required at aglobal level by governments, management agencies, NGOs and bodies such as thesecretariats to international conventions. Such information can assist in prioritizingneeds, helping to direct assistance to key sites and activities, as well as to evaluate theresults of intervention programs. By identifying where success is being achieved, as wellas where problems exist, information on management effectiveness can help identify andpromote best practice.

The World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) currently works with the IUCN WorldCommission on Protected Areas (WCPA) to maintain a global protected areas database. Informationheld in the database principally concerns the attributes of the protected area (e.g. location, size,management category, principal ecosystems). Limited information is also held on aspects such asstaffing and budgets for some sites. The database has provided an essential picture of what the globalprotected area estate consists of, but not how well it is managed.

Jeremy HarrisonChair, Protected Areas and Landscapes ProgrammeWorld Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) 219 Huntingdon RoadCambridge CB3 0DLUNITED KINGDOMemail: jerry.harrison@wcmc.org.uk

1 Marc HockingsUniversity of Queensland, Australiaemail: hockings@uqg.uq.edu.au

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Managing and Applying Information on Protected Area ManagementEffectiveness at Global and Regional Levels: The Role of WCMC and WCPA

Jeremy Harrison and Marc Hockings

IntroductionWhy is there a need for information on management effectiveness at a global level - whatpurposes could this information serve, who wants to use it, and what are the problems incollecting it?

Information about the effectiveness of management of protected areas is sought by site managers,management agencies, governments, NGOs and bodies, such as the secretariats to internationalconventions and programmes.

At the site or agency level, the application of this type of information is clear. Site managers can use itto improve delivery of conservation outcomes and other protected area objectives “on the ground” (or“in the sea”) through promoting an adaptive approach to management. They can also use suchinformation to meet formal reporting requirements as well as less formal accountability needs tospecific stakeholders and the broader community. At the site level, assessments of managementeffectiveness and data from monitoring programmes will, in most cases, be either collected directly bysite managers or agencies, or by project staff and researchers working closely with the managers.

At the international level, the reasons for collecting and using this information may be rather less clear.International convention and programme secretariats can use it to assess the extent of implementationof these programmes and to set future priorities. Funding agencies can use it to assess relative prioritiesand to identify key areas for investment. Researchers can use it to study in a comparative way thelimiting factors in implementation of protected areas. International NGOs can use it to identify wheretheir support might be required.

The collection and use of information at global and regional levels is, we suggest, far moreproblematical than the collection and use of information at the site and system level. The problemsrelate to the means by which such information may be collected, the motivations and interests of thevarious people who could collect such information, and uses to which this information could be put.

There are four principal means by which information on management effectiveness could be assembledinto a global or regional dataset:

a) Management agencies in each State report to an international organization on the results of their ownsite-level assessments

b) National level NGOs undertake assessments, with or without the cooperation of managementagencies and report to an international organization or to a parent international NGO

c) International NGOs undertake assessments and either maintain their own data repository or reportresults to an international organization

d) Consultants/international project staff/NGO staff/research institutions collect information in thecourse of specific projects and report this information to an international organization on an ad hocbasis.

In all cases the quality of information will be enhanced if managers are intimately involved in thecollection of data and the assessment of management effectiveness. In particular the assessment ofoutcomes (i.e. the achievement of objectives) will require the cooperation of managers in the process,as such assessments will normally be based on field monitoring which would require approval from themanagement agency.

But managers and management agencies may be reluctant to provide a global or regional organizationwith information from site-based assessments. In most cases the use of this information will notdirectly benefit managers and there is a risk that such information may be used against them. In recent

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discussions, the senior staff of one national protected area management agency from a developedcountry indicated that, while they were interested in collecting information on managementeffectiveness for their own purposes, they could see no benefit in reporting the findings of suchassessments internationally.

Incorporating management effectiveness information as one element of the reporting requirements ofinternational agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is one possiblemechanism for encouraging countries to contribute such data, but consistent and reliable protocols forreporting have proved difficult to establish in many cases (for example, periodic reporting under theWorld Heritage Convention is only just beginning to be implemented this year). There is also a dangerthat countries or individual protected areas that can demonstrate effective management may be willingto provide information, whereas those with real problems may be unwilling to participate.

Leaving aside consideration of the potential sensitivity of information on management effectiveness,we need to recognize that assembling information on protected areas at a global scale is difficult in anycircumstance. The World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) has for many years beencollecting basic data on protected areas for the UN List which is published every few years incollaboration with the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA). The last edition waspublished in 1997. In the lead up to this edition, information request forms were sent to more than 650protected area agencies, of which just over 50 per cent replied. Given that the information requested inthis survey is both less detailed than would be required for assessing management effectiveness andalso less politically sensitive, the chance of assembling a comprehensive dataset on managementeffectiveness is not good.

There is currently no global dataset on management effectiveness, although some information thatcould be used to make at least partial assessments has been collected through various mechanisms. Forexample a significant number of management agencies provided WCMC with information on budgetsand staffing in response to a survey conducted in 1993 and 1995 (James 1999). In other casesinformation on management effectiveness has been collected, primarily through project-based workand published in project reports (e.g. Kothari et al. 1989; Environment and Development Group, 1997).Although this information may be available in project reports, it has generally not been transferred intoany of the global databases containing protected area information.

The current roles of WCMC and WCPA in collecting, managing, and applying information onprotected areas

The IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) is the largest global network of protectedareas managers and specialists. Its objectives are to assist in the planning of protected areas and theirintegration into all sectors, to strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of protected area managers, andto seek to increase investment in protected areas. All of these activities require information in order tohelp focus attention where it is needed, so WCPA works closely with WCMC to identify whatinformation is required, to collect and manage it, and to use it appropriately. WCPA appoints taskforces to work on particular themes, and a task force on management effectiveness of protected areashas been working to identify what needs to be done at national and site levels, and the information thatis required at international levels in order to support national action.

The World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) has been compiling and managing informationon the world’s protected areas since 1981, working in close collaboration with WCPA. WCMCmanages a database that contains information provided primarily by protected area managementagencies in each country. The main product is the United Nations List of Protected Areas that isregularly produced – the last edition was released in 1997, the next will be in 2003 for the World ParksCongress.

The World Database on Protected Areas managed by WCMC is meant to be flexible, to incorporate arange of information, and to link to other data managed by other organizations. To this end WCMC iscurrently working with the WWF/World Bank Forest Alliance, and others, to make the databaseavailable over the Internet. WCMC is also working with several WCPA task forces to identify furthercategories of information that could be usefully added to the database to increase its value to theinternational community. This includes information on management effectiveness.

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Given the roles and experience of WCPA and WCMC, and the close partnershipbetween them in the collection and use of information on protected areas, we wouldrecommend that WCMC be recognized as the international agency which would takeresponsibility for coordinating compilation of an international dataset on managementeffectiveness of protected areas. This work would be carried out under the auspices ofWCPA, and based on the experience of the WCPA Task Force on ManagementEffectiveness.

What are the issues/impediments that need to be addressed in establishing a globaldata gathering system for management effectiveness information?

Some of the significant issues that need to be addressed in establishing an international system forinformation on protected area management effectiveness are:

a) accounting for regional/national variations in management standards

Management standards will vary between protected areas in different parts of the world. This ispartly a reflection of the different resources available to managers (e.g. north/south differences) butalso differences in culture and context. These differences in management standards will lead todifferences in the relative emphasis given to different aspects of management and in the criteriaused to assess management effectiveness. Comparison between regions therefore becomesdifficult. A good example of this is Alex James’ work on investments in protected areas carried outin collaboration with WCMC (James et al., 1999). The study demonstrated wide variations ininvestment levels but in many cases the interpretation of this data is confounded by regionaldifferences.

b) dealing with data derived from different assessment methodologies

There are already many different methodologies, in place or in preparation, for assessingmanagement effectiveness and this will, inevitably, continue to be the case. An internationaldataset therefore has to be able to cope with this diversity. It will mean that a simple solutiontightly defining a number of attributes that countries and agencies will be asked to report on willnot work. Rather we need to establish a system that defines the types of data that are relevant toassessing management effectiveness and to provide an information management system that candraw on the outcomes of a range of assessment methods. There may be some capacity to furtherharmonize data into a common rating system but this is yet to be determined, and is politicallycharged. This issue of harmonisation of data from different methodologies remains one of themajor challenges to establishing a viable system for international recording of managementeffectiveness information.

c) managing sensitive information

Protocols governing access and use of information on management effectiveness will need to beestablished. Given the potential concerns of protected area site and system managers thatinformation on management effectiveness may be misused, it is important that they can see thatthe information is managed and used responsibly. This might include restricting access to certaincategories of information, ensuring that information is always presented with certain caveats, oralways reviewing products with protected area professionals before release or publication (such asreview by the WCPA Steering Committee which includes representatives of the protected areasprofession in each region). These “controls” should be clear when collecting information.

d) potential roles (and conflicts) of different national players in collectinginformation and reporting on management effectiveness

In the first section of this paper, we discussed the potential impediments to establishing aninternational reporting system for management effectiveness information. Clearly the primarysource of information should be the relevant management agency, but it is often of value to reviewthis information against the opinion of non-governmental agencies with appropriate experience.However there are different interests and concerns amongst the various government and non-

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governmental players in this field. An international dataset should probably contain informationderived from both sources, but the information about a site or system provided from these differentsources may conflict. Some system for resolving these differences and for validating informationwithin the database is required, although it would be preferable if this was done in-country beforethe information was received. Using the WCPA network, especially the regional groups ofmembers and the regional vice-chairs, may provide a mechanism for addressing some of theseissues.

Using the WCPA management effectiveness framework as a structure for collecting, managingand applying information on management effectiveness

One of the primary functions of the WCPA Framework for assessing management effectiveness(Hockings et al., 2000) is to provide a mechanism to harmonize different assessment methodologiesand to guide the development of new assessment studies. In this sense the Framework can be likened toa “tool box” that contains a series of tools (different assessment methodologies) together with guidancefor the use of the various tools. It provides an organizing structure that illustrates the way in whichdifferent types of information can contribute to an overall assessment. It does not attempt to define asingle approach or a set of universal criteria for assessing management effectiveness.

We feel that there is potential for the Framework to provide the same sort of organizing structure for aglobal dataset dealing with the results of different assessment methodologies. Building on thisassumption, the following section includes a draft datasheet developed by Hockings et al. (2000), basedupon the WCPA Framework, for reporting information on protected area management effectiveness atsite level. It would be relatively straightforward to add this as a new module in the World Database onProtected Areas managed by WCMC.

In proposing this we are well aware of the difficulties of collecting information that can be comparedon a regional or global basis. Estimations of effectiveness and degree of threat in a rich country with awell-maintained protected area system cannot easily be compared with those of a country where thereare severe resource constraints, political problems and no implementation of protected area systems,without in the former case losing the fine detail that managers require. Thus whilst information oneffectiveness within the database should be completely comparable within a site, some variation can beexpected within a country or region and comparisons between regions should be approached far morecautiously.

The proposed dataset (Table 1) is outlined below and its application to two protected areas discussedimmediately following (Table 2). Such a table, when it is used, would also include a preambledescribing the uses of the information and explanatory notes.

The next steps

In order to develop a system that works, it is essential to have the confidence of those providing theinformation on management effectiveness. The following proposed set of activities is intended to takethis into account. The proposed steps also focus on international meetings as opportunities to reviewwhat is being done and as a focus for dissemination and use of the results.

a) Review the proposed framework at the “Beyond the Trees” conference, discussing both theframework itself and its potential use.

b) Modify the framework and develop guidelines on its use following the advice of the conference.Modify the World Database on Protected Areas to handle the information that would be derivedfrom use of the framework.

c) Test the application of the framework with a number of countries in a participatory exercise toassess use of the questionnaire itself, to identify the key problems in its use, and to secure furthercomment on the framework and guidelines.

d) Incorporate the results of the test into the World Database on Protected Areas, and preparesummary reports and analyses.

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e) Revise the framework and guidelines based on the experience gained, and review these revisionswith the working group of countries who participated in the test phase.

f) Review the project at the 2003 World Parks Congress, and secure the endorsement of the worldprotected areas community in carrying out a full survey of management effectiveness.

g) Fully implement the programme to compile information on management effectiveness of protectedareas.

h) Make the results of this survey available to support preparation for the Conference of Parties to theConvention on Biological Diversity, which has protected areas on its agenda for the meeting in2004.

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References

Environment and Development Group 1997. Institutional review of the GhanaWildlife Department, Vols. 1 and 2. Unpublished report to the Government of Ghana,Environment and Development Group, Oxford, UK

Hockings, M., Stolton, S., and Dudley, N. 2000. Evaluating Effectiveness: AFramework for Assessing Management of Protected Areas (Discussion draft, March2000). IUCN, WCPA.

James, A. 1999. Institutional Constraints to Protected Area Funding. Parks 9(2):15-26, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland

James, A.N., Green, M.J.B. and Paine, J.R. (1999). A Global Review of ProtectedAreas Budgets and Staff. WCMC Biodiversity Series No. 10. World ConservationPress, Cambridge, UK. vi+46pp

Kothari, A., P Pande, S Singh and D Variava 1989. Management on National Parks and Sanctuaries inIndia: A Status Report. New Delhi: Environmental Studies Division, Indian Institute of PublicAdministration.

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Table 1 Sample datasheet for recording information on management effectiveness

Has an assessment been carried out? Yes No

Brief description of the assessment system used

What is the date of the assessment?

Where is it available?(i.e. web site link, email or ordering details)

Context: significance and threatsIs the site globally biologically significant and why? (See WCMC1996 for criteria used to assess significance)Is the site nationally biologically important and why? (See WCMC1996 for criteria used to assess significance)Are there other reasons (cultural, aesthetic, tourist) why the site isparticularly significant?Threats: List up to the 3 most important threats that impact on PA values and rate the significance of their impact (seebelow)

Threat 1

Threat 2

Threat 3

Comments

Rating system tobe used

A = serious and widespread threatB = serious but localized threatC = moderate and widespread threatD = moderate but localized threatE = minimal impact on values

Planning:Is boundary demarcation adequate? Yes No

Comment: design features which compromise or complement the system

Are there clear management objectives and/or a management plan? Objectives Plan

Yes No Yes NoDate of last update?

Comments on management plan

InputBudget2 Amount If possible accompanied by estimate of need or shortfall

Are budget deficiencies seriously restricting management effectiveness? (use rating system below)

Comments (include information on the basis used to calculate budget figures)

Staff numbers3 If possible accompanied by estimate of need or shortfall

Are staff deficiencies seriously restricting management effectiveness? (use rating system below)

Comments (include information on the basis used to calculate staff figures)

Are infrastructure deficiencies seriously restricting management effectiveness? (use rating system below)

Comments

Rating system to be used A = Serious impactB = Moderate impactC = Minimal or zero impact

2 If possible, include total budget, recurrent and capital budgets, foreign assistance3 If possible, include total staff, field staff, administration staff and other staff

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OutcomesList up to three key indicators (ideally at least one should include biodiversity)Indicator 1 Basis of assessment

Conclusion of assessment – see rating below

Comment

Indicator 2 Basis of assessment

Conclusion of assessment – see rating below

Comment

Indicator 3 Basis of assessment

Conclusion of assessment – see rating below

Comment

Is further detail available on the indicators reported here? Yes No

Is information available on other outcome indicators? Yes No

Where can this be found?

Ratingsystem

Favourable Favourable/unchangedFavourable/recoveringFavourable/degrading

Unfavourable Unfavourable/unchangedUnfavourable/recoveringUnfavourable/degrading

Scoring derived from an assessmentMany assessments include some rating or scoring, often principally relating to management processes. If these exist,enter important data in the fields below.Element being scored Score as percentage1 Overall results of the scoring system used

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

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Table 2 Application of reporting to two protected areas

Data field (Element and Criteria) Fraser Island World Heritage Site, Australia Dja Faunal Reserve, CameroonHas an assessment been carried out? Yes YesBrief description of the assessment system Adapted from WCPA framework Adapted from WCPA frameworkDate of assessment 1995-2000 1999Source: University of Queensland, Australia WWF/IUCN Forest Innovations Project, Gland, SwitzerlandContext:Significance International (WH site, IUCN category 2) International (WH site, biosphere reserve, IUCN category?)Threats: List 3 most significant threats and rateimpact

Visitor pressure B Collection of bushmeat

Inappropriate fire regime C EncroachmentLack C Lack of management resources & continuity

Comment None Lack of baseline data and contact with people (in particular pygmies)living in the reserve

Planning:Boundary demarcation adequate Yes NoComment on Reserve design: Insular character assists in preventing impacts from

surrounding area. In holdings on East Coast have minorimpact on integrity.

Large size provides some security, but lack of buffer zone and majorchanges in surrounding land problematic

Objectives/management plan Objectives Plan ObjectivesYes Yes Yes

Last update 1994 1995Comment Regional, whole of government plan Project planning onlyInput:Budget A$3,685,639 UnknownAre budget deficiencies seriously affectingmanagement effectiveness

A A

Comment (include information on the basisused to calculate budget figures)

Includes user pays revenue, State and Federal Governmentallocations. Budget has been substantially reduced fromprevious year

Sudden cut in funding, led to early curtailment of major project

Staff Approximately 40 UnknownAre staff deficiencies seriously affectingmanagement effectiveness

B A

Comment (include information on the basisused to calculate staff figures)

Park staff only – i.e. does not include regional staff whodedicate time to Fraser Island issues

IUCN had 28 project staff in Dja, most of whom have been dismissedafter funding cut

Are infrastructure deficiencies seriouslyrestricting management effectiveness?

C A

OutcomeUp to 3 indicators (at least one indicator shouldideally reflect biodiversity)

a. Vegetation change a. Community attitudes to the protected area

b. Fauna b. Faunac. Visitor impacts

Comment: Basis of assessment a. Regular monitoring of sample plots across vegetationtypes

a. Interviews with local people

b. Monitoring of rare and threatened species andsignificant species

b. Reports from park staff

c. Road condition, coastal camping impact monitoringand wader population surveys

Conclusion of assessment a. Favourable/degrading a. Favourable/degrading

b. Favourable/unchanged b. Unfavourable/degrading

c. Favourable/unchanged

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Comment a. Some evidence of vegetation change resulting frominappropriate fire regimes, logging was ceased onisland in 1992

a. Unless management of the protected area delivers benefits to thelocal people, outside pressures from logging companies and thebushmeat trade will result in degradation

b. No comment b. The vegetation is still relatively intact but poaching for thebushmeat trade is leading to serious decline in fauna

c. Increasing visitor numbers have led to significantimpacts in some areas, particularly along the coastalmargins and popular visitor destinations

Are further details available on the indicatorsreported here?

Yes Yes

Is information available on other outcomeindicators?

Yes Yes

Where is this available? University of Queensland, Australia WWF/IUCN Forest Innovations Project, Gland, Switzerland

ProcessOverall result of scoring system used 61% 51%Score broken down by main components People management 60% Status of PA

Resource protection and management 58% Information, availability & planning efficiencyManagement systems and processes 63% Financial and human resource sustainability

Natural resources and management systems/vulnerabilityPartnershipsRelationship with local communities

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Maintaining the Integrity of Natural World Heritage SitesMeeting the requirements of the World Heritage Committee in design of natural sitesfor inscription on the World Heritage List and for periodic reporting on the state oftheir conservation

P H C (Bing) Lucas

AbstractThe World Heritage Convention aims to protect natural and cultural heritageconsidered by the World Heritage Committee to be of "outstanding universal value"and to meet the Conditions of Integrity laid down by the Committee. The Committeehas also laid down a process of periodic reporting by States whose sites are inscribedon the List in a systematic effort to ensure that the integrity of sites is maintained.

A significant number of forested areas are inscribed on the World Heritage List andthis paper discusses criteria and Conditions of Integrity relevant to forested areas of"outstanding universal value" already on the List or which may be nominated infuture.

Mechanisms to assess management effectiveness are a key to maintaining the integrityof sites, while the high profile of World Heritage sites means that they have greatpotential to demonstrate the importance of management effectiveness for protectedareas as a whole.

P H C (Bing) LucasVice-Chair for World HeritageIUCN World Commission on Protected Areas1/268 Main RoadTawaWellingtonNEW ZEALAND 6006Fax: +64 4 2329129

Maintaining the Integrity of Natural World Heritage Sites

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Meeting the requirements of the World Heritage Committee in design of natural sitesfor inscription on the World Heritage List and for periodic reporting on the state oftheir conservation

P H C (Bing) Lucas

1. The World Heritage Convention

The Convention concerning the protection of the world cultural and natural heritage,better known as the World Heritage Convention, had its origin in the recognition thatthere are some places in the world that are of such "outstanding universal value" thatthe world community shares a concern for their protection and that, if they arethreatened for any reason, the world community will do what it can to help protectthem.

The Convention was born out of twin streams of concern for both natural and culturalsites seen to be under various types of threat, not the least being the inadequacies ofmanagement. This concern was brought to a head by a UNESCO-led internationalcampaign in the 1960s to fund the salvage of the Nubian monuments at Abu Simbelfrom the impounded waters of the Nile. The twin streams in UNESCO for culturalsites and in lUCN for natural ones came together at the Stockholm Conference on theHuman Environment in 1972 and bore fruit with the negotiation of a singleConvention at the General Conference of UNESCO, later that year.

At the time of writing, 158 States had become parties to the Convention and, inbecoming members of the Convention, had committed themselves to protect their ownnature and culture and to share in support of World Heritage Sites throughout theworld. This sharing of skills and resources is particularly important to countries whichare short of management skills and finance for they can obtain help from the WorldHeritage Fund to train staff and fund conservation.

Decisions under the Convention are made by the World Heritage Committeerepresentative of 21 member States elected at the two-yearly General Conference ofUNESCO and supported by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre based in Paris. Twoof the NGOs named in the Convention, which assist the Committee in an advisorycapacity, are IUCN - The World Conservation Union, in relation to natural sites, andICOMOS (the International Council of Monuments and Sites) for cultural sites.

2. The World Heritage List

Successive Committees have established and developed Operational Guidelines whichlay down the criteria under which properties are inscribed on the World Heritage List.To be inscribed, properties must meet two standards.

Firstly, they must be considered to be, in the words of the Convention, of"outstanding universal value". For this, there are criteria included in the OperationalGuidelines, six for cultural sites and four for natural sites.

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Secondly, the values for which sites are considered of "outstanding universal value"must be such that the properties meet the Test of Authenticity for cultural sites andConditions of Integrity for natural sites. Clearly, the latter relates to the effectivenessof management and protection.

In making a decision on whether or not a property meets both standards of"outstanding universal value" and authenticity/integrity, the World HeritageCommittee takes advice from the relevant advisory body. IUCN and ICOMOSthemselves take advice from reviewers and send missions to the sites. These missionsinclude a focus on the effectiveness of site management. The relevant advisory bodysubmits a written report and recommendations on the sites nominated, initially to theWorld Heritage Bureau (a seven-member executive of the Committee) before adecision is taken by the Committee.

Currently, there is a move to bring the operation of the Convention closer together interms of seeing the ten criteria as representing a continuum from nature to culture aswell as endeavouring to settle on a single set of Conditions of Integrity. An expertmeeting to discuss these issues and review the Operational Guidelines was held from10 to 14 April 2000 in Canterbury, United Kingdom, and their report will go to theBureau when it meets in Paris on 26 June.

3. Properties on the World Heritage List

By the end of the most recent session of the World Heritage Committee held atMarrakesh, Morocco in December 1999, 630 properties from 118 countries had beeninscribed on the World Heritage List. Of these, 480 were listed under the Culturalcriteria, 128 under the Natural criteria and another 22 under both Cultural and Naturalcriteria.

Of the 150 sites inscribed under Natural criteria, lUCN considers that about half ofthese have been inscribed wholly or significantly because of the importance of theirforests.

4. The importance of effective management

The Committee has also laid down in its Operational Guidelines, a process ofreactive monitoring which, in the case of Natural sites is undertaken by either or boththe World Heritage Centre and IUCN. As its name implies, reports are taken to theBureau or Committee when some significant problem to a property's value exists oris threatened. Additionally, the Operational Guidelines provide for periodic reportingby States whose sites are inscribed on the List on the state of conservation of thoseproperties in a systematic effort to ensure that the integrity of sites is maintained.

Clearly, mechanisms to assess management effectiveness are a key to the periodicreporting process and to the maintenance of the integrity of sites. The importance ofthis is out of proportion to the numbers of properties on the World Heritage List asthe high profile of World Heritage sites means that they have great potential todemonstrate the importance of management effectiveness for protected areas as awhole.

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5. The Design and Management of Forested World Heritage Properties inrelation to the Operational Guidelines

Of the four criteria for Natural properties, those most directly relevant to forested areasare Natural criteria (ii) and (iv). Relevant extracts are:

(ii) "... outstanding examples representing significant on-going ecological and biological processes in the evolution and development of terrestrial.... ecosystems and communities of plants and animals"

(iv) "... the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situconservation of biological diversity, including those containing threatenedspecies of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science andconservation."

The other two criteria also have relevance, criterion (i) addressing geological valuesand criterion (iii) "superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional naturalbeauty and aesthetic importance ".

Some of the Conditions of Integrity in the Operational Guidelines are criteria specific;others apply to Natural sites falling under the range of criteria. I will focus on those whichare directly relevant to the theme of this Conference.

Sites described under criterion (ii) "should have sufficient size and contain thenecessary elements to demonstrate the key elements of processes that are essentialfor the long-term conservation of the ecosystems and the biological diversity theycontain; for example, an area of tropical rain forest should include a certain amountof variation in elevation above sea-level, changes in topography and soil types,patch systems and naturally regenerating patches..."

Sites described under criterion (iv) "should contain habitats for maintaining themost diverse fauna and flora characteristic of the bio(geo)graphic province andecosystems under consideration; for example, .... an island ecosystem should includehabitats for maintaining endemic biota; a site containing wide-ranging speciesshould be large enough to include the most critical habitats essential to ensure thesurvival of viable populations of those species; or an area containing migratoryspecies, seasonal breeding and nesting sites, and migratory routes should beadequately protected…”

There are three sub-paragraphs in the Guidelines which relate generally to Naturalsites:

Subpara (v) says that Natural sites "should have a management plan". It goes on tosay that "When a site does not have a management plan at the time when it isnominated..., the State Party concerned should indicate when such a plan willbecome available and how it proposes to mobilize the resources required for thepreparation and implementation of the plan. The State Party should also provideother document(s) (e.g. operational plans) which will guide management of the siteuntil such time when a management plan is finalized.

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Subpara (vi) says that Natural sites "should have adequate long-term legislative,regulatory, institutional or traditional protection." It goes on to discuss boundariessaying that 'The boundaries ... should reflect the spatial requirements of habitats,species, processes or phenomena that provide the basis for its nomination... Theboundaries should include sufficient areas immediately adjacent to the area ofoutstanding universal value in order to protect the site's heritage values from directeffects of human encroachment and impacts of resource use outside of thenominated area."

The section goes on to discuss protected area boundaries and zoning saying "Theboundaries of the nominated site may coincide with one or more existing orproposed protected areas, such as national parks or biosphere reserves. While anexisting or proposed protected area may contain several management zones, onlysome of those zones may satisfy (the) criteria...; other zones, although they may notmeet the criteria..., may be essential for the management to ensure the integrity ofthe nominated site; for example, in the case of a biosphere reserve, only the corezone may meet the criteria and the conditions of integrity, although other zones, i.e.buffer and transitional zones, would be important for the conservation of thebiosphere reserve in its totality."

Subpara (vii) says that Natural sites "should be the most important sites for theconservation of biological diversity. Biological diversity, according to the newConvention on Biological Diversity, means the variability among living organismsin terrestrial ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part andincludes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems..." with "Onlythose sites which are the most biologically diverse ... likely to meet criterion (iv)..."

Clearly, in terms of the design of forest areas, key issues are those of size, adequacyof boundaries, and the concept of buffer zones. These are also directly relevant to theeffectiveness of management, as are those of legal or traditional protectionmechanisms, management plans and resources to implement them. Incidentally,traditional protection mechanisms were added to the list of mechanisms acceptablefor natural World Heritage sites only at Kyoto in 1998 when a site relying ontraditional protection was inscribed - East Rennell in the Solomon Islands.

6. Periodic Reporting

The responsibility of States which have sites inscribed on the World Heritage List toreport periodically on their stewardship stems from the text of the Convention itselfand relate not simply to the World Heritage Committee but to the GeneralConference of UNESCO itself.

Article 29 says that States Parties of the Convention shall, in the reports they submitto the General Conference of UNESCO "on dates and in a manner to be determinedby it, give information on the legislative and administrative provisions which theyhave taken for the application of this Convention, together with details of theexperience acquired in this field."

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This provision was most recently addressed in 1997 when the UNESCO GeneralConference "invited the States Parties to the World Heritage Convention to submitin accordance with Article 29 of the Convention, through the World HeritageCommittee, via its Secretariat, the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, reports on thelegislative and administrative provisions and other actions which they have takenfor the application of the Convention, including (emphasis added) the state ofconservation of the World Heritage properties located on its territories."

The General Conference in 1997 also "requested the World Heritage Committee todefine the periodicity, form, nature and extent of the periodic reporting..." on theapplication of the Convention and on the state of conservation of World Heritageproperties and to examine and respond to those reports "while respecting theprinciple of State sovereignty".

When the World Heritage Committee met at Kyoto in 1998, it decided to inviteStates Parties to submit periodic reports every six years using a defined format. Italso decided to examine the periodic reports region by region according to thefollowing timetable:

Region Examination of properties Year of examinationinscribed up to and by the Committeeincluding

Arab States 1992 2000Africa 1993 2001Asia/Pacific 1994 2002Latin America/Caribbean 1995 2003Europe/North America 1996/97 2004/2005

The World Heritage Centre sees periodic Reporting as serving four main purposes:

* to provide an assessment of the application of the World Heritage Conventionby the State Party

* to provide an assessment as to whether the World Heritage values of theproperties inscribed on the World Heritage List are being maintained overtime

* to provide up-dated information about the World Heritage properties torecord the changing circumstances and state of conservation of the properties

* to provide a mechanism for regional cooperation and exchange of informationabout experiences between States Parties concerning the implementation ofthe Convention.

The format as advised to States Parties falls into two sections.

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Section I deals with the overall application of the Convention within the Stateconcerned.

Section II deals with the state of conservation of each specific World Heritageproperty.

Section II is thus clearly directly relevant to management and to the measurement ofits effectiveness. This is borne out by one of the General Requirements that"Expressions of opinion should be supported by reference to the authority on whichthey were made and the verifiable facts which support them."

For the purpose of this Conference, the full text of Section II which sets out what isexpected for each of the relevant World Heritage properties is attached to this paperas an annex.

It will be noted that paragraph II.6 headed "Monitoring" says that this item "analysesin more detail the conditions of the property on the basis of key indicators formeasuring its state of conservation" and goes on to say that "If no key indicatorswere identified at the time of inscription... this should be done in the first periodicreport. The preparation of a periodic report can also be an opportunity to evaluatethe validity of the earlier identified indicators and to revise them, if necessary." Itadds that "Up-to-date information should be provided in respect of each of the keyindicators..."

Marc Hockings has taken this whole issue of the relation to assessing managementeffectiveness in relation to World Heritage Natural sites further at the WorldHeritage Centre workshop held in The Broads, UK. This workshop is fortunate tohave input from Marc who heads the task force on Management Effectiveness forthe IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas.

The process of periodic reporting in relation to the State of Conservation of WorldHeritage Sites is in its infancy in a systematic way and, in this respect the input ofMarc's Task Force and of this Conference is very timely for those who will beinvolved in periodic reporting on natural World Heritage Sites and for those whowill have the task of reviewing those reports region by region.

Similarly, this Conference will take these issues forward in a timely manner to theWorld Parks Congress 2003 in Durban, South Africa with the theme of "BenefitsBeyond Boundaries". This ten-yearly conference on protected areas is significant inbeing the largest IUCN event to be held on the African continent and it will coincidewith the 30th Anniversary of the adoption of the World Heritage Convention in1972.

Mechanisms for measuring management effectiveness are vital tools for StatesParties to the World Heritage Convention. The Convention is responsible forfulfilling the requirements for Periodic Reporting and is a key in maintaining theintegrity of natural sites. Applying management effectiveness mechanisms to WorldHeritage sites, with their high profile, demonstrates that these mechanisms havegreat potential to measure management effectiveness of all types of protected areas,forested or otherwise.

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ANNEX

EXTRACT FROM "PERIODIC REPORTING ON THE APPLICATION OFTHE WORLD HERITAGE CONVENTION"

"Explanatory Notes"

issued by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre 1999

SECTION II: STATE OF CONSERVATION OF SPECIFIC WORLDHERITAGE PROPERTIES

(II.i) The twenty-ninth General Conference of UNESCO, in its decision regardingthe application of Article 29 of the World Heritage Convention, invited theStates Parties to submit reports on the application of the World HeritageConvention, including the state of conservation of the World Heritageproperties located on its territories.

(II.ii) The primary documents in respect of each World Heritage property are thenomination dossier as it was submitted by the State Party and the decision ofthe World Heritage Committee regarding the inscription of the property onthe World Heritage List.

(II.iii) The preparation of periodic state of conservation reports should involve thosewho are responsible for the day-to-day management of the property. Fortrans-boundary properties it is recommended that reports be prepared jointlyby or in close collaboration between the agencies concerned. The preparationof periodic state of conservation reports could include expert advice from theSecretariat and/or the Advisory Bodies, if and when the State Party(ies)concerned so wish(es).

(II.iv) The first periodic report should update the information provided in theoriginal nomination dossier. Subsequent reports will then focus on anychanges that may have occurred since the previous report was submitted.

This section of the periodic report follows, therefore, the format for thenomination dossier.

(II.v) The World Heritage Committee reviews the state of properties included in theList of World Heritage in Danger at regular intervals, in general once everyyear. This review concentrates on the specific factors and considerations thatled to the inscription of the property on the List of World Heritage in Danger.It will still be necessary to prepare a complete periodic report on the state ofconservation of these properties.

(II.vi) This section should be completed for each individual World Heritageproperty. States Parties are invited to provide information under thefollowing headings:

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11.1 Introduction

a. State Partyb. Name of World Heritage propertyc. Geographical coordinates to the nearest secondd. Date of inscription on the World Heritage Liste. Organization(s) or entity(ies) responsible for the preparation of

the reportf. Date of reportg. Signature on behalf of State Party

11.2 Statement of Significance

At the time of inscription of a property on the World Heritage List, the WorldHeritage Committee indicates its World Heritage values by deciding on the criteriafor inscription. Please indicate the justification for inscription provided by the StateParty, and the criteria under which the Committee inscribed the property on theWorld Heritage List.

In the view of the State Party, does the statement of significance adequately reflectthe World Heritage values of the property or is a re-submission necessary? Thiscould be considered, for example, to recognize cultural values of a natural WorldHeritage property, or vice-versa. This may become necessary either due to thesubstantive revision of the criteria by the World Heritage Committee or due to betteridentification or knowledge of specific outstanding universal values of the property.

Another issue that might be reviewed here is whether the delimitation of the WorldHeritage property, and its buffer zone if appropriate, is adequate to ensure theprotection and conservation of the World Heritage values embodied in it. A revisionor extension of the boundaries might be considered in response to such a review.

If a statement of significance is not available or incomplete, it will be necessary, inthe first periodic report, for the State Party to propose such a statement. Thestatement of significance should reflect the criterion (criteria) on the basis of whichthe Committee inscribed the property on the World Heritage List. It should alsoaddress questions such as: What does the property represent? What makes theproperty outstanding? What are the specific values that distinguish the property?What is the relationship of the site with its setting, etc.? Such a statement ofsignificance will be examined by the Advisory Body(ies) concerned and transmittedto the World Heritage Committee for approval, if appropriate.

11.3 Statement of authenticity/integrity

Under this item it is necessary to review whether the values on the basis of whichthe property was inscribed on the World Heritage List, and reflected in the statementof significance under item 11.2 above, are being maintained.

This should also include the issue of authenticity/integrity, in relation to theproperty. What was the evaluation of the authenticity/integrity of the property at thetime of inscription? What is the authenticity/integrity of the property at present?

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Please note that a more detailed analysis of the conditions of the property is requiredunder item 11.6 on the basis of key indicators for measuring its state ofconservation.

11.4 Management

Under this item, it is necessary to report on the implementation and effectiveness ofprotective legislation at the national, provincial or municipal level and/or contractualor traditional protection as well as of management and/or planning control for theproperty concerned, as well as on actions that are foreseen for the future, to preservethe values described in the statement of significance under item 11.2.

The State Party should also report on significant changes in the ownership, legalstatus and/or contractual or traditional protective measures, managementarrangements and management plans as compared to the situation at the time ofinscription or the previous periodic report. In such cases, the State Party is requestedto attach to the periodic report all relevant documentation, in particular legal texts,management plans and/or (annual) work plans for the management and maintenanceof the property. The full name and address of the agency, or person directlyresponsible for the property, should also be provided.

The State Party could also provide an assessment of the human and financialresources that are available and required for the management of the property, as wellas an assessment of the training needs for its staff.

The State Party is also invited to provide information on scientific studies, researchprojects, education, information and awareness building activities directly related tothe property and to comment on the degree to which heritage values of the propertyare effectively communicated to residents, visitors and the public. Matters that couldbe addressed are, among other things: is there a plaque at the site indicating that theproperty is a World Heritage property? Are there educational programmes forschools? Are there special events and exhibitions? What facilities, visitor centre, sitemuseum, trails, guides, information material etc. are made available to visitors?What role does the World Heritage designation play in all these programmes andactivities?

Furthermore, the State Party is invited to provide statistical information, if possibleon an annual basis, on income, visitor numbers, staff and other items if appropriate.

On the basis of the review of the management of the property, the State Party maywish to consider if a substantive revision of the legislative and administrativeprovisions for the conservation of the property is required.

11.5 Factors affecting the property

Please comment on the degree to which the property is threatened by particularproblems and risks. Factors that could be considered under this item are those thatare listed in the nomination format, e.g. development pressure, environmental

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pressure, natural disasters and preparedness, visitor/tourism pressure, number ofinhabitants.

Considering the importance of forward planning and risk preparedness, providerelevant information on operating methods that will make the State Party capable ofcounteracting dangers that threaten or may endanger its cultural or natural heritage.Problems and risks to be considered could include earthquakes, floods, land-slides,vibrations, industrial pollution, vandalism, theft, looting, changes in the physicalcontext of properties, mining, deforestation, poaching, as well as changes in landuse, agriculture, road building, construction activities, tourism. Areas whereimprovement would be desirable, and towards which the State Party is workingshould be indicated.

This item should provide up-to-date information on all factors which are likely toaffect or threaten the property. It should also relate those threats to measures taken todeal with them.

An assessment should also be given if the impact of these factors on the property isincreasing or decreasing and what actions to address them have been effectivelytaken or are planned for the future.

11.6 Monitoring

Whereas item 11.3 of the periodic report provides an overall assessment of themaintenance of the World Heritage values of the property, this item analyses in moredetail the conditions of the property on the basis of key indicators for measuring itsstate of conservation.

If no indicators were identified at the time of inscription of the property on theWorld Heritage List, this should be done in the first periodic report. The preparationof a periodic report can also be an opportunity to evaluate the validity of earlieridentified indicators and to revise them, if necessary.

Up-to-date information should be provided in respect of each of the key indicators.Care should be taken to ensure that this information is as accurate and reliable aspossible, for example by carrying out observations in the same way, using similarequipment and methods at the same time of the year and day.

Indicate which partners, if any, are involved in monitoring and describe whatimprovement the State Party foresees or would consider desirable in improving themonitoring system.

In specific cases, the World Heritage Committee and/or its Bureau may have alreadyexamined the state of conservation of the property and made recommendations to theState Party, either at the time of inscription or afterwards. In such cases the StateParty is requested to report on the actions that have been taken in response to theobservations or recommendations made by the Bureau or Committee.

11.7 Summary of conclusions and recommended actions

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The main conclusions under each of the items of the state of conservation report, butin particular as to whether the World Heritage values of the property are maintained,should be summarized and tabulated together with:

a. Main conclusions regarding the state of the World Heritage values ofthe property (see items 11.2 and 11.3 above)

b. Main conclusions regarding the management and factors affecting theproperty (see Items 11.4 and 11.5 above)

c. Proposed future action/actionsd. Responsible implementing agency/agenciese. Timeframe for implementationf. Needs for international assistance.

The State Party is also requested to indicate what experience the State Party hasobtained which could be relevant to others dealing with similar problems or issues.Please provide names of organizations or specialists who could be contacted for thispurpose.

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Site Conservation PlanningA Framework for Developing and Measuring the Impact of Effective BiodiversityConservation Strategies

Jeffrey Parrish

AbstractThe Nature Conservancy is implementing a standardized site conservation planning(SCP) approach at all sites where the Conservancy works with its network ofconservation partners. SCP is a framework for developing and measuring the impactof biodiversity conservation strategies. The SCP approach represents the cumulativeexperience of 50 years of site-based conservation efforts, and offers a breakthroughadvance in monitoring actual impacts to biodiversity. Historically, most measures ofconservation success employed by the Conservancy and other conservationorganizations have relied upon programme or project activity or capacity buildingindicators, as proxies for indicators that describe impacts to conservation targets(species, natural communities, ecosystems). The SCP approach monitors biodiversityhealth, threat abatement, and conservation capacity at sites, and relates these measuresof success to conservation strategies. These measures of success (MOS) are developedin an innovative Excel-workbook tool that generates biodiversity health and threatabatement scores for individual targets and threats at sites, and rolls up these measureswith conservation capacity to generate overall conservation success scores for the site.The MOS tool also captures ranking criteria, explanatory documentation, and usercomment, and is intended to generate baseline results that can be systematicallycompared with results from subsequent iterations in a site monitoring programme.

Presented by Roger Sayre

Jeffrey Parrish Conservation Science DepartmentInternational Conservation ProgramThe Nature Conservancy4245 N. Fairfax Drive, suite 100Arlington VA 22203UNITED STATESemail: jparrish@tnc.org

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Site Conservation PlanningA Framework for Developing and Measuring the Impact of Effective BiodiversityConservation Strategies

Jeffrey Parrish

Introduction

Conservationists need a disciplined and strategic approach for developing andevaluating conservation strategies. To be effective, a site conservation planningmethodology must be based on (1) a careful identification of focal biological systemsand analyses of their viability, (2) a prioritized ranking of the stresses that impair thehealth of those biological systems and the sources of those stresses, and (3) carefulmeasurement of conservation success that will ensure the adaptive management ofconservation actions at sites.

This paper describes a Site Conservation Planning (SCP) methodology developed by The NatureConservancy and its conservation partners from experience gained from several decades ofconservation work in the US and Latin America and the Caribbean. Site Conservation Planning is itselfnot a product; it is a framework and approach for ensuring the effective delivery of positiveconservation impact, evidenced by improving the health of biodiversity and abating the threats thatplace that biodiversity in peril. The framework is a proven, pragmatic, and directed means for siteconservationists to identify their critical needs hierarchically and develop prioritized conservationaction for the protection or improvement of biodiversity health and the reduction and removal ofcritical threats.

Because this framework links the focal elements of biodiversity used in planning – bethey mangroves, coral reefs, or jaguars – with their most pervasive and critical threats,the conservation strategies that result are more powerful, more focused, and ultimatelymore efficient and effective at conserving biodiversity. Moreover, the SiteConservation Planning framework is a scale-independent process. Equally functionalat scales of geographic regions, nations, ecoregions, multi-site landscapes, individualprotected areas, or on private lands, the target and threat-based approach todevelopment of conservation strategies serves as a flexible yet solid foundation toidentify conservation priorities and strategies for action.

The Site Conservation Planning Framework

There are six core elements of the Site Conservation Planning Framework:

Targets: the elements of biodiversity at a site, and the natural processes that maintain them,that will be the focus of site planning and around which strategies will be developed. Theintent of target identification is to develop a short effective list of species, communities, orlarge-scale ecological systems, whose protection will capture all the biodiversity at the site.Stresses: the types of degradation and impairment afflicting a target(s) at a site.Sources: the proximate agents generating the stresses. Together, the sources and the stressesthey cause to the conservation targets comprise the threats to the biological systems.Stakeholders: the social, cultural, political, and economic constraints and opportunitiespresented by stakeholders (those that affect and are affected by conservation), and thepotential for the participation of those stakeholders.Strategies: the types of conservation activities deployed to abate sources of stress (threatabatement) and to reduce the impact of persistent stresses (through management andrestoration).

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Measures of Success: metrics of conservation impact through focused monitoring ofbiodiversity health and threat abatement.

The logic underlying the SiteConservation Planning framework issimple (Fig. 1). Our implicitconservation goal at a site is tomaintain viable occurrences of theconservation targets found at the site.We develop and implementconservation strategies to (1) abatecritical sources of stress, and (2)directly restore or enhance thesystems. In addition, strategies willneed to be employed that buildcapacity to conserve the biodiversityin the long term and to increase theparticipation of critical stakeholdersin biodiversity conservation. Our

measures of conservation success evaluate the effectiveness of our strategies in abating threats (ThreatStatus and Abatement measure) and in restoring or maintaining viable targets and site functionality(Biodiversity Health measure).

The Site Conservation Planning process begins with a series of information gatheringand analysis steps that will lead to conservation strategies (Fig. 2). These informationgathering steps, all interrelated, are focused on the identification of the focalconservation targets at the site and determination of their viability, a careful analysisand prioritization of the critical threats at the site, and a focused examination of thestakeholders at the site and how they relate to the targets and threats. Once theconservation goals and priorities at the site are determined in the information analysisstages, site practitioners then develop planning products. These include: (1) a groupof priority strategies focused on improvement of the biodiversity health of theconservation targets, the abatement of critical threats, and the building of conservationcapacity, and (2) a suite of indicators that will inform the measures of conservationimpact, or success at the site. A critical feature of the planning process is its iterativenature: the process is a framework that can and should constantly be improved,updated, and adaptively managed to ensure that investments continue to be made inthe conservation strategies that are most efficient and effective at improving the healthof the biodiversity and abating the threats those biodiversity elements face.

SYSTEMS STRESSES SOURCES

STRATEGIES

Biodiversity Health

Threat AbatementRestoration

SUCCESS

Threat Status

Figure 1

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Conservation Targets

Site conservation begins with understanding the conservation targets: the important species, ecologicalcommunities, and ecological systems – including the natural processes that maintain them – that justifythe selection of a site for conservation action. From this list of conservation targets, it is important thatsite conservation practitioners choose a smaller number (approximately eight) focal conservationtargets that will represent all the biodiversity and the threats present at the site and around whichconservation strategies can be focused and developed (see Table 1). Identification of focal conservationtargets is the basis for all subsequent steps in site planning, including identifying threats, developingstrategies, measuring success, and delineating site boundaries. The primary purpose of conservationtargets in site planning is to guide conservation strategies at individual sites—what critical threats mustbe abated and what ecological restoration and management must be performed to maintain or enhancethe viability of the site’s biodiversity?

Site Conservation PlanningSite Conservation Planning

ConservationTarget

Identification

Conservation Goals

Systems Stresses & Sources Strategies Success

Ecological Context /Biodiversity Health

Assessment of Targets

Iterative AnalysisIterative Analysis : Adaptive Management through Measures of Success: Adaptive Management through Measures of Success

Stakeholder Informationand Analysis

Situation Diagrams

Stakeholders

Indicator Monitoring

• Viability of FocalConservation Targets

• Abatement of CriticalThreats

Measures of Success

Strategy Development

Direct• Improve Biodiversity

Health• Threat AbatementIndirect• Capacity Building• Stakeholder Engagement

Strategy Implementation

Conservation Zone Mapping

Sources

Stresses

Identification of Critical Threats

Action Plan Development

ParticipatoryConservation Action

InformationGathering &Assessment

SCPProducts

Figure 2

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Identifying Focal Conservation TargetsThe following steps are recommended for identifying focal conservation targets for a site:

1. Review the elements of biodiversity that occur in the planning area.Where possible, this review should be based on lists developed throughlarger-scale (regional, national or ecoregional) biodiversity conservationplanning. Conservation targets may include the following:

a. Ecological communities (groupings of co-occurring species).

b. Spatial assemblages of ecological communities, or “Ecological Systems”. These aredynamic aggregations of ecological communities that (1) occur together on the landscape;(2) are linked by ecological processes underlying environmental features (e.g. geology) orenvironmental gradients (e.g. elevation); and (3) form a robust, cohesive, anddistinguishable unit on the ground. Ecological systems can be terrestrial, aquatic, marine,or a combination thereof. Major habitat types such as cloud forest, coral reefs, andestuaries, are included within this category.

c. Species. Species may serve as conservation targets if they are (1) imperilled andendangered native species; (2) of special concern due to vulnerability, declining trends,disjunctive distributions, or endemic status; (3) focal species (including ecologicalkeystone species, wide-ranging species, and umbrella species); (4) major groupings ofspecies that share common natural processes or conservation requirements (e.g.freshwater mussels, and forest-interior birds); (5) globally significant speciesaggregations, such as a migratory shorebird congregations.

2. Identify the focal conservation targets for site conservation planning.The conservation targets thatoccur at a site may be toonumerous to individually assessfor site planning, in which caseit is important to focus on asubset of targets, around whichconservation strategies can bestbe developed. Screening forfocal conservation targetsshould be done at multiplescales of biodiversityorganization, beginning athigher levels and workingdown, using the following steps:

a. Screen for coarse-scaleecological systems andcommunities targeted duringregional, ecoregional, ornational planning. If no large-scale conservation planninghas occurred in the region inwhich the site is located, beginwith a list of major habitat types and large matrix communities thatcompose the land cover of the site. Such coarse-scale ecologicalcommunities and systems provide the broadest “coarse filter” forrepresenting finer-scale communities and species, and may necessarily

Table 1. Examples of conservation targets from selectedplatform sites of The Nature Conservancy and ConservationPartners in Latin America. Lists are not comprehensive.

RVATION TARGETS

nfo, Mexico § Cloud forest§ Moist tropical forest§ Quetzal, Matudea trinervia§ Endemic cycads and ferns

vispe, Mexico § Natural vegetation mosaic of, juniper and oakmunities§ Black bear§ Riparian system

artos, Mexico § Coastal wetlands§ Endemic dune vegetation§ Petenes (tropical hummocks)§ Flamingo nesting sites

ú, Colombia § Quercus humboldtii forest§ Riparian forest and its fluvial processes

Nuevo, DominicanRepublic

§ Pine Forest Systems§ Cloud Forest§ Pajón Savanna

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serve as first-iteration targets when detailed information on more fine-scale communities or species is lacking.

b. Consolidate individual species and ecological communities into majorgroupings and ecological systems, respectively. At sites wherenumerous species and communities have been identified, combineecological communities or species that share a common set of sustainingecological processes or conservation requirements into an ecologicalsystem or species group.

c. Identify individual species or ecological communities that have specialrequirements. Individual communities or species should be selected ifthey are rare or imperilled, and if they require particular conditionsthat are different from the conditions required by other coarse-scaletargets, i.e. they will not be included under the umbrella of the focaltargets identified in the previous steps.

d. Identify individual species or communities that integrate acrossecological systems. For complex sites with many ecological systems, itwill be important to ensure that linkages and connections between thesystems are intact. Recognize individual species that utilize numerousecological systems during their life cycle, and ecological communitiesthat are transitional between two or more systems.

e. It is recommended that, where possible, no more than eight focalconservation targets be chosen for a given area, due to the difficulty ofstrategy development and implementation for a list substantially largerthan this number. Of the conservation targets identified through thefirst four steps, identify the eight that best meet the following threecriteria:

• Reflect large-scale conservation planning goals. Focal targets that are grounded in thereasons for the site’s selection within a national or ecoregional portfolio of conservationsites are more desirable.

• Represent the biodiversity at the site. The focal targets should represent the array ofecological systems, communities and species at the site. A target that complementsother focal targets in this respect is more desirable.

• Can be monitored. Targets that can be cost-effectively monitored and their viabilityassessed are more desirable.

Assessing the Viability of Conservation Targets

The continued existence of the focal conservation targets at the site will depend uponmaintaining the natural processes that allowed them to establish and thrive in the past, thecareful setting of conservation goals to maintain those processes and the overall viability(health) of the targets, and the definition of boundaries for conservation action based on thetargets’ ecology and biological needs. The following steps are useful in assessing theviability of conservation targets.

1. Assess the size, condition, and landscape context of each focal target at thesite

The continued existence of the focal conservation targets at the site willdepend upon maintaining the natural processes that allowed them toestablish and thrive in the past. Three factors – size, condition, and landscapecontext – should be considered in characterizing viable occurrences of thefocal conservation targets. These can be assessed quantitatively, but

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categorical assessment (very good, good, fair, poor) may be more appropriategiven the uncertainty of precise features of long-term viability for a giventarget.

• Size is a measure of the area or abundance of the conservation target’s occurrence. Forecological systems and communities, size is simply a measure of the occurrence’s patchsize or geographic coverage. For animal and plant species, size takes into account thearea of occupancy and number of individuals. Minimum dynamic area, or the areaneeded to ensure survival or re-establishment of a target after natural disturbance, isanother aspect of size that needs to be considered in setting viability goals.

• Condition is an integrated measure of the composition, structure, andbiotic interactions that characterize the occurrence. This includes factorssuch as reproduction, age structure, biological composition (e.g. presenceof native versus exotic species; presence of characteristic patch types forecological systems), structure (e.g. canopy, understory, and groundcoverin a forested community; spatial distribution and juxtaposition of patchtypes or seral stages in an ecological system), and biotic interactions (e.g.levels of competition, predation, and disease).

• Landscape context is an integrated measure of two factors: the dominant environmentalregimes and processes that establish and maintain the target occurrence, andconnectivity. Dominant environmental regimes and processes include herbivory,hydrologic and water chemistry regimes (surface and groundwater), geomorphicprocesses, climatic regimes (temperature and precipitation), fire regimes, and manykinds of natural disturbance. Connectivity includes such factors as species targets havingaccess to habitats and resources needed for life cycle completion, fragmentation ofecological communities and systems, and the ability of any target to respond toenvironmental change through dispersal, migration, or re-colonization.

2. Rank the focal conservation targets for viability

The viability of a conservation target is a function of the size, condition, and landscape context of thetarget, as described above. Based upon the best available knowledge and expert judgement, targetviability is assigned to one of four viability classes (very good, good, fair, or poor) based strictly on itscurrent size, condition, and landscape context. A target should not be down-ranked because a threatlooms on the horizon; the potential threat could be abated. When available, maps of target distribution,fragmentation, distribution patterns, and threats can be very helpful in visualizing the state of a target’sviability; their use is recommended in viability assessments wherever possible.

The Nature Conservancy has developed a useful tool (the “Measures of Conservation Success” Excelworkbook) for assessing viability and documenting the careful thinking used in its assessment. Site-planning teams should document the decision-making process underlying the viability rank assigned toeach conservation target in order to maintain institutional memory of the ecological attributes importantto the health of the target and to guide monitoring of progress toward conservation goals for thespecific targets. The team should describe the size, condition, and landscape context attributes thatjustify the assigned rank, and what changes in these attributes would cause the occurrence to be up-ranked or down-ranked by one rank.

3. Determine “Biodiversity Health” of the site

The biodiversity health determination for the site should be done using the “Measuresof Conservation Success” methodology. The Excel “Measures” workbook tool isdesigned to facilitate the thinking and calculations to make this health determinationfor a site. Assessing the cumulative biodiversity health of a site is helpful whenevaluating overall programme or project impact and assists organizations dedicated tosite management in making effective decisions for biodiversity conservation.

4. Set conservation goals and establish the ecological boundaries of the site

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Conservation Goals are determined to move conservation action toward the desired futurecondition of a target—a goal specifies the characteristics for a viable occurrence (see Table2). Although it may be necessary to focus many conservation actions within the confines ofdecreed protected areas, it should be recognized that conservation of a target may not besustainable unless actions occur at scales appropriate to maintain the size, condition, andlandscape context dictated by the ecology and natural history of the target. These scales maybe smaller or larger than the boundaries of a decreed site. Collectively, the boundaries of theconservation targets and their sustaining processes (i.e. ecological boundaries) delineate thefunctional conservation site—the area necessary to maintain the viability of the conservationtargets over time, including the natural patterns and processes that sustain the targets.

Threats: Stresses and Sources To understand the threats that confront the viability of thebiodiversity conservation targets we aim to conserve, and to ensurethat we develop effective conservation strategies, we need tounderstand the stresses affecting the focal conservation targets—asdistinct from sources of stress. In essence, stress is the impairmentor degradation of the size, condition, or landscape context of aconservation target, and results in reduced viability of the target . Asource of stress is an extraneous factor, either human (e.g. policies,land uses) or biological (e.g. non-native species), that infringes upona conservation target in a way that results in stress. Stresses Two important steps should be considered inunderstanding and evaluating the factors that impairconservation targets: 1. Identify Major Stresses to the Conservation Targets When identifying the major stresses to conservationtargets, consider the following important points:• For planning purposes, only destruction or

degradation of priority conservation targetsresulting directly or indirectly from human (not natural) causes should beconsidered a stress.

• Stresses to consider should be happening now, or have high potential tooccur in the near future—do not consider past stresses that no longeraffect the viability of the target.

Illustrative List of Stresses

Habitat destruction or conversionHabitat fragmentationHabitat disturbanceAlteration of natural fire regimesNutrient loadingSedimentationToxins/contaminantsExtraordinary

predation/parasitism/diseaseModification of water levels; changes in

natural flow patternsThermal alterationSalinity alterationGroundwater depletionResource depletionExtraordinary competition for resourcesExcessive herbivory

Altered composition/structure

Table 2. Examples of Conservation Goals for targets in the Reserva Ría Lagartos, Mexico.

CONSERVATION TARGETS CONSERVATION GOALS

Coastal wetlands Maintain or restore natural water flowEndemic dune vegetationcommunity

Maintain current vegetation cover ondunes

Restore vegetation in degraded areasPetenes Maintain vegetation cover in a 50m

band around the water perimeterFlamingos Maintain two viable nesting sites.

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• The stresses afflicting each focal conservation target need to be identified.• It is important to be as precise as possible in identifying the stresses; this

will help focus the subsequent identification of sources of stress, andfacilitate development of ecological management and restoration goalsand strategies designed to improve biodiversity health.

2. Rank the StressesThe relative seriousness of a stress is a function of two factors:• Severity of damage. What level of damage to the conservation target can reasonably be

expected within ten years under current circumstances?• Scope of damage. What is the geographic scope of impact to the conservation target expected

within ten years under current circumstances? Is the stress pervasive throughout the targetoccurrences, or localized?

Based upon the best available knowledge and judgements, the stresses to eachpriority conservation target are ranked (very high, high, medium, or low).The stress ranking should be based on the explicit assessment of severity andscope of the stress. Although we are concerned about all stresses tobiodiversity at our sites, it is critical to prioritize these stresses based onseverity and scope. Our conservation strategies should reduce or eliminatethose stresses that have high severity combined with wide scope.Prioritization of stresses will mean that strategically we will be less concernedabout a stress with very severe impacts to only a small area, or stresses thatare widespread but with low severity.

The Nature Conservancy’s “Measures of Conservation Success” Excel workbook facilitates thecharacterization and assessment of stresses (including the calculations of severity and scope) andallows site planning teams to document the decision-making process that underlies the rankassigned to each conservation target. The Excel Workbook contains computer-automated templatesthat automatically rank the identified stresses to each target based on an assessment of severity andscope.

SourcesFor each stress afflicting a given conservation target, there are one or more causes or sources of thestress. For example, nutrient loading is a stress to many aquatic ecosystems, where excess nutrients inthe water draw off oxygen and therefore kill fish and other aquatic life. However, the nutrient loadingmight be caused by many different sources, such as intensive agrochemical use, cattle grazing, or urbanrunoff. In order to define the strategies that relieve the stresses from our priority conservation targets,we must determine the factors that cause the destruction or degradation of those priority targets at thesite. There are four fundamental steps for addressing these causes, or sources of stress andunderstanding and measuring the critical threats at sites:

1. Identify Current Sources of Stress Most sources of stress are rooted in incompatible human uses of land, water,and natural resources that are ongoing or have occurred in the past butcontinues to have an impact. There are several points to consider whenidentifying sources of stress to conservation targets:

• When multiple sources all contribute to a given stress, focus threatabatement strategies on the source or sources that are mostresponsible for the stress.

• Focus on those sources that, if allowed to occur at a site, will have along-term duration, and thereby cause long-term impacts (e.g., urbandevelopment).

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• The sources of stress to consider should be happening now, or havehigh potential to occur in the near future—do not consider pastsources that no longer cause stress to the system.

• Identify the most proximate sources (e.g.incompatible timber harvest) rather thanultimate sources (e.g. human populationgrowth), as sources that are several stepsremoved from the impacts on targets willnot bring us to realize direct, feasibleconservation strategies.

2. Rank the SourcesThe relative seriousness of a source is a functionof the following factors:

• Degree of contribution to the stress. Thecontribution of a source, acting alone, to the fullexpression of a stress (as determined in the stressassessment), assuming the continuation of the existingmanagement/conservation situation. Does theparticular source make a very large or substantialcontribution to causing a stress, or a moderate or lowcontribution?

• Irreversibility of the stress. The reversibility of thestress caused by the source. Does the source producea stress that is irreversible, reversible at extremelyhigh cost, or reversible with moderate or littleinvestment?

Based upon the best available knowledge andjudgements, each source should be assigned arank in the same manner as was done forstresses. Again, the ranking should be based onthe explicit assessment of contribution andirreversibility (the “Measures of ConservationSuccess” Microsoft Excel Workbook can assist inthis process.)

3. Identify Critical Threats It is critical that investments in conservationstrategies at sites be focused on the abatement of the most critical threatsrather than those of lesser destructive nature that are easier to address or forwhich funding was provided. The final step in the assessment of stresses andsources is a synthesis of the individual stress and source analyses, whichidentifies the critical threats to the conservation targets at a site and allowsfor priorities to be determined. A “threat,” as we traditionally know it, isactually a combination of a stress and a source of stress. For takingcorrective action, the source should be the focus of threat abatement strategies,under the assumption that abatement of the source will alleviate the stressand result in higher viability and health of the conservation target(s).

Identifying critical threats has three steps. For each conservation target: i) calculate a Threat rank for each stress-source combination, and

ILLUSTRATIVE LIST OF SOURCES

Agricultural and ForestryIncompatible crop production practicesIncompatible livestock production practicesIncompatible grazing practicesIncompatible forestry practicesLand DevelopmentIncompatible primary home developmentIncompatible second home/resort developmentIncompatible commercial/industrial developmentIncompatible development of roads or utilitiesConversion to agriculture or silvicultureWater ManagementDam constructionConstruction of ditches or diversion systemsChannelization of rivers or streamsIncompatible operation of dams or reservoirsIncompatible operation of drainage systemsExcessive groundwater withdrawalPoint Source PollutionIndustrial dischargeLivestock feedlotIncompatible wastewater treatmentMarina developmentResource ExtractionIncompatible mining practicesIncompatible oil or gas drillingOverfishing or overhuntingPoaching or commercial collectingRecreationIncompatible recreational useRecreational vehiclesLand/Resource ManagementFire suppressionIncompatible management of/for certain speciesBiologicalParasites/pathogensInvasive/alien species

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ii) combine the Threat ranks for each source into a Threat-to-Target rank.iii) Finally, for each source of stress, combine the Threat-to-Target ranks

across conservation targets into a Critical Threat rank of “Very High,”“High,” “Medium,” or “Low” for the sources of stress at a site. Thisanalysis allows site practitioners to identify the most damaging threats toa site that are the highest priority for abatement strategies (See Table 3).

This process is more easily understood through work with the Stresses/Sourcesand Threats Summary worksheets in the Measures of Conservation SuccessExcel workbook. 4. Assign “Threat Status” for the SiteThe Threat Status of the site can be ranked (Very High, High, Medium, or Low) to assess overallprogress at a site over time in reducing threats. This overall site rank is based on the assessment of theeight highest ranked threats. A set of rules has been developed for combining the eight highest criticalthreat ranks into the Threat Status for a site, and these are explained in detail in the full SiteConservation/Measures of Conservation Success Handbook and are calculated automatically in theExcel workbook tool (See Table 3). Assessing the critical threats for an entire site is helpful to setoverall investment in conservation strategies for a site-management programme and for evaluatingoverall project impact.

Conservation Stakeholders

Practical experience in many sites in Latin America and the Caribbean has shown that decisions madewithout stakeholder participation, or an adequate grasp of the human context, can createmisunderstandings with local communities and other key resource users, such as industry,governments, or municipalities – which can ultimately undermine site-based conservation over thelong-term. Protected areas are often home to groups of people dependent on protected area naturalresources for survival. Diverse political, environmental and economic interests can converge aroundthese areas with potential to nurture conflict and pose a challenge to biodiversity conservation andplanning. Moreover, such misunderstanding can impede the formation of a coalition of diverseconservation actors who work together from their various sectors toward mutual conservationobjectives. Identification of stakeholders, and an analysis of both the impact of human activity onthreatened protected areas and of conservation strategies on those same stakeholders are importantcomponents of Site Conservation Planning.

Table 3. Exemplary analysis of critical threats for Parque Nacional Valle Nuevo,Dominican Republic, resulting from Site Conservation Planning effort, February, 2000.

Active Threats Across Conservation Targetsin Parque Nacional Valle Nuevo, DominicanRepublic

PajonSavanna

ManaclarPalm Forest

Broad-leafCloudForest

PineForest

CriticalThreatRank

Crops and Agriculture High High Very High High Very HighFire Low - - High MediumCattle Ranching - High Low - MediumChemical Waste High - - Low MediumSelective Extraction - Medium Medium Medium MediumIntroduced Species of Fauna Low - - Medium LowOpening and Use of Roads - - Medium Low LowIntroduced Species of Flora Low - - Low LowSolid Waste Low - - - LowHunting - - Low - LowThreat Status for Targets and Site High High High High High

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Just as ecological information is gathered to determine a site’s conservation targets and assess theirhealth, it is critical to assess the human context at the site. Identification of the most criticalstakeholders, assessment of their interests, and understanding the ways in which these interests affecttarget viability, is crucial information for conservation strategy development. The thoughtful analysisof stakeholder resource use and the causes of their behaviours, both positive and negative, contribute tothe development of more effective strategies to protect the outstanding elements of biodiversity –strategies that are focused on work with the stakeholders most directly involved with a particular targetor threat. More importantly, the participation of key stakeholders and local communities in the SiteConservation Planning process can ensure their responsible role in efforts to promote sustainableresource use at a site, and ultimately the success of the conservation plan’s implementation.

Several tools have been developed to better understand the human stakeholder context of conservationat a site. Among these are stakeholder diagrams which illustrate the interrelationships between variousstakeholders at a site and the relationships of these same stakeholders to particular conservation targetsor threats. Stakeholder analyses that reveal essential information about the human context ofconservation at the site are extremely useful. Table 4 illustrates essential information aboutconservation stakeholders shown to be critical for the development of effective conservation strategies.

Table 4. Illustrative stakeholders analysis for tropical dry forest in the Calakmul Reserve,Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.

Target CriticalSource ofStress

PrimaryStake-holder

Effect ofPrimaryStake-holder onTarget

SecondaryStake-holder

Effect ofSecondaryStakeholder onPrimaryStakeholderBehaviour

Strategies Actions Effect ofStrategies onPrimary andSecondaryStakeholders

Tropicaldry forest

Selectivetimberextraction

Localresidents

Removal oflargediametercommercialtree species

Timbermarketintermediar-ies

Provide, andlimit, marketaccess to localresidents.

Give localresidents aneconomicalternative tounpredictableagriculturalcrops (andsubsistence-levelagriculture)

Introducesustainableforestrymanagementtechniques

Through aparticipatoryplanningprocess discussthe need foraccess tomarkets andappropriatemanagementmethods. Hireexperts fromsimilar projectsat otherprotected sitesto bringsustainablemanagementtechniques tolocal residents.

Strongeralliance of localresidentsthroughsustainableforestrymanagementproject whichcould alsofacilitate bettermarket access.

May angermiddlemen.

Strategies for Conservation

The way site practitioners respond, or fail to respond, to the critical threats and persistent stresses willlikely be the single most important factor affecting the long-term viability of the focal conservationtargets at the site. The ultimate objective of conservation strategies is to reduce the stresses that aredegrading and impairing, and thus lowering the viability of, the focal conservation targets. There aretwo major paths for accomplishing this objective. The first is to abate the critical threats, i.e. removethe active sources of stress, with the assumption that the stress will decrease if its source is removed.This is the objective of threat abatement strategies. The array of threat abatement strategies identifiedshould be focused on abatement of the highest-ranked critical threats that were identified in the source-stress analysis in the Site Conservation Planning process in order to ensure that resource investments instrategies are effective in protecting priority conservation targets. However, in some instances, even ifthe active source is abated, the stress to the target may persist. In these instances, it will be necessaryto deploy restoration strategies, with the objective of directly reducing the persistent stress. Also, itwill often be necessary to deploy strategies that build capacity, engage local community stakeholders,or promote priority policy actions rather than directly abate threats or persistent stresses. Such indirect

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strategies have high leverage, in that they pave the way for direct threat abatement and restorationstrategies. The most important features of strategies and actions identified in the Site Conservation Planningprocess is their direct link to the site conservation priorities – the focal targets and the abatement of themost critical threats. Yet, no summary could ever begin to dictate the list of possible conservationstrategies. Possible strategies are likely to stem from an array of conservation approaches, including (1)acquisition or management of land and water resources that sustain the biodiversity targets; (2)changes in public policy that will abate the threats to targets; or (3) compatible development actionsthat encourage stakeholders in and around sites to act to change practices and themselves act asstewards for the priority conservation targets and sites. As we strive to protect large, landscape-scale, functional sites that maintain the long-term viabilityof our conservation targets, site boundaries will often intersect the activities of local humancommunities. Critical threats often stem from incompatible economic activities in these adjacenthuman communities. Therefore strategies in an increasing number of sites where we work willdemand an understanding of the cultural, political, and economic context that represents thedriving forces behind the critical threats. This understanding will be critical not only to developsound threat abatement strategies, but also to develop conservation actions that work withstakeholders who themselves become engaged in the protection of biodiversity conservationtargets.

After potential conservation strategies are developed, they should be evaluated and rankedusing three criteria: Benefits, Feasibility/Probability of Success, and Costs of Implementation .

1. Benefits Benefits result from addressing threats (how likely will the strategy eliminate the source ofthe stress to the targets, and is the proposed strategy central to the abatement of that criticalthreat?) , enhancing the systems (how likely is the strategy to enhance the viability of thetargets through abatement of persistent stresses?), and developing high-leverage

Table 5. Exemplary strategies for hypothetical stresses and sources of stresses to a tropical forest.

S TRESSES S OURCES OF S TRESS S TRATEGIES

Logging native trees § Construction of vacationhomes

§ Construction of hotels§ Urban growth§ Selective logging

§ Negotiation on state and municipal tourismdevelopment policy.

§ Land-use legislation on timber regulations anddevelopment of alternative industry orsustainable forestry initiatives.

Decrease in aquaticpopulations

§ Increase in fishing effort§ Use of unauthorized fishing

gear

§ Diversification of production activities§ Training and outreach of fishing groups§ Fishing legislation§ Research and monitoring of fishing resources.

Modification of water flow § Road construction§ Water channelization

§ State and municipal policy negotiation to buildculverts to permit water flow under roadways

§ Restoration of water flow§ Research and monitoring of water flow and

aquatic biodiversity response to restoredhydrologic regimes.

Organic pollution and solidwaste

§ Open air sewage§ Fishing waste

§ State and municipal policy negotiation§ Outreach and training of fishers and local

inhabitants in waste disposal§ Research and monitoring of pollution sources.

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opportunities that build support for conservation (will the strategy be catalytic and encourageconservation actions by others, in other sites important to biodiversity conservation?).

2. Feasibility/Probability of Success Two key factors arecritical to successful implementation:

§ Lead Person and Institution. Perhaps the single most important factor of success is findingthe right person to take the lead for the site and the responsibility to implement the strategy.

§ Ease and Lack of Complexity. Despite the best plans and the best people, there are myriadforces outside of anyone’s control that can cause plans to succeed, fail, or change. The morecomplex the strategy, the more likely that unanticipated events outside will substantiallyaffect the outcome. For this reason, it is wise to invest in some relatively small, simple,achievable strategies.

3. Costs of Implementation.Consider not only the Commitment of limited discretionary resources and the probability ofsecuring new resources for the strategy, but also, the programmatic cost of failure to otherimportant conservation strategies, whose success may be threatened if a high-visibility andrisky strategy fails.

Working from the list of highest ranked strategies, select a small number for immediateimplementation. Look for the strategies that will produce high benefits with the greatest chance ofsuccess and affordable costs. The best people and discretionary resources should be focused earlyon the highest leverage ideas. Early successes will be important in that they can reinforce theinterests and issues important to partners and key sectors in the community. These early successescan then serve as a foundation for larger, more complex, high leverage projects.

Measuring Conservation Success

The Nature Conservancy has defined conservation success as making substantialprogress towards (1) the long-term abatement of critical threats and (2) the sustainedmaintenance or enhancement of conservation target viability at sites identified forConservancy action. Yet how much progress is being made by site practitioners giventhe current suite of implemented strategies? This key question can be answered at twolevels: for individual threats and targets, and for the site as a whole. Tracking changesin the status of threats, and conservation targets through careful measurements ofconservation progress, allows the effectiveness of individual conservation strategies tobe assessed, and maintains the adaptive management of conservation actions.

Measures of Conservation Success are a complementary methodology developed byThe Nature Conservancy to monitoring progress at the site level. Measures ofConservation Success follows directly on the Site Conservation Planning frameworkand provides a simple yet compelling method for assessing conservation progress atwhole sites and across sets of sites (e.g. sites within an national protected areaportfolio), thereby determining overall programmatic success of suites of strategiesand conservation investments. The site-level Measures of Conservation Successdetermine Biodiversity Health – the viability of focal conservation targets at a site,and Threat Status and Abatement – our success in abating critical threats to theconservation targets at a site. However, there is often a time-lag betweenimplementation of threat abatement strategies and abatement of the threat, and aneven longer time-lag between strategy implementation and showing changes inbiodiversity health. Accordingly, a set of short-term indicators has been developedthat reflect our Conservation Capacity to implement effective strategies at action sites(see box, “The Conservation Capacity Measure”).

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Measures of Conservation Success vs. Indicator Monitoring for Targets and ThreatsThe Biodiversity Health and Threat Status measures, though based on an assessmentof individual conservation targets and threats, have been designed to summarize theoverall, or average, level of biodiversity health and threat abatement at a site. By theirsummary nature, they mask the changes in individual targets and threats, andtherefore may not be adequate for site-level, adaptive management decision making.However, the information required for assessing the viability of individual targets (i.e.size, condition, and landscape context) and to rank individual stresses (i.e. severityand scope) and sources (i.e. contribution and irreversibility) can and should be usedfor site-based decision making. These attributes in target viability assessment can beuseful in determining appropriate fine-scale indicators for target monitoring, and canhelp in measuring progress towards specific conservation goals for individual targets.For example, one critical attribute for viable condition of a mangrove system might bethe maintenance of water salinity within a natural range of variation. Viability for thisconservation target might be more responsively measured through indicator measuresof salinity and water chemistry at appropriate intervals during wet and dry seasons,when freshwater input varies according to the speed and extent of watershed runoff.Similarly, fine-scale measures of the growth or reduction of threatening practices tobiodiversity may give early signs of success or failure in threat abatement strategies.Each site-planning and implementation team will need to design an ecological andthreat-monitoring programme that efficiently provides the appropriate information fortarget-level and site-level monitoring that will ensure adaptive management of sites.

The Conservation Capacity MeasureConservation Capacity is assessed only for sites where the Conservancy is playing a meaningful conservationrole in support of conservation at the site. To help evaluate Conservation Capacity, a set of indicators hasbeen developed for each of the key success factors. Experience to date indicates that three key factorsaccount for success at action sites:

1. Project Leadership and Support

a. Focused Responsibility for ConservationA project director from the Conservancy or a partner organization is assigned the jobresponsibility for conserving the project, with sufficient time to focus on developing andimplementing conservation strategies at the site. At landscape action sites, the project director isdedicated full time to the project.b. Proven Coach or MentorAt landscape action sites, the project has regular, ongoing, hands-on involvement by anexperienced conservation practitioner, with proven results in landscape-scale projects.c. Project Support TeamThe project receives regular, high-level assistance from a full-service, experienced support team,including conservation science, protection, land and water management, applied research, privateand public funding, operations. The support may be provided via on-site staff, country or centralinternational programme staff.

2. Strategic Approach to the Project

a. Understanding/Application of the Site Conservation Planning framework (a priority-driven,target- and threat-based approach to development of conservation strategies)The Project director and a multi-disciplinary team have developed a sound strategic plan for siteconservation, with participation by an experienced conservation practitioner(s).b. Iterative, Adaptive Approach to Developing and Implementing Conservation StrategiesA multi-disciplinary project team meets regularly (e.g. annually or biannually) to assess progress,evaluate results based on monitoring of appropriate indicators of biodiversity health and threatabatement, review & test strategic hypotheses and make necessary strategic adjustments.

3. Project Funding and Sustainability

a. Start-up and Short-term FundingFunding has been secured, pledged or is highly probable for core operations for at least two years,

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Conclusion

The Site Conservation Planning approach and its associated Measures of Successworkbook tool offer much promise for site-based conservation practitioners. TheSCP/MOS approach will be implemented at all Nature Conservancy sites in theUnited States and all international sites where the Conservancy works withconservation partner organizations. The World Bank and the United States Agency forInternational Development are studying SCP/MOS for its utility in guiding andreporting on conservation projects, and the possibility exists that several LatinAmerican and Caribbean governments will adopt the methodology as a standard fornational protected area planning, with its focus on key conservation targets at a site.The viability requirements for these targets, and the threats to and threat abatementstrategies for those targets, the SCP/MOS framework promises to significantlyadvance site conservation efforts wherever applied.

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The Use of Certification of Sustainable Management Systems and TheirPossible Application to Protected Area Management

Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley

AbstractCertification systems – such as those associated with organic agriculture, forestmanagement, fisheries and ecotourism – can help monitor the effectiveness ofprotected areas. Three main roles for certification are identified: (1) Certification ofoperations within protected areas (particularly in Category V areas related tooperations such as organic farms, various forms of management for non-timber forestproducts and ecotourism). (2) Certification of land uses within the buffer zones ofprotected areas or in the corridors of protected area networks. (3) Creation ofadditional protected areas as a result of certification (such as the requirement toprotect a proportion of forest in Forest Stewardship Council certification schemes).The paper gives examples and suggests that certification within protected areas mayin some cases require more stringent application of existing standards or additionalcodes of practices, for example if a nature reserve is managed as an organic farm toprotect the biodiversity associated with cultural landscapes.

Nigel Dudley & Sue StoltonEquilibrium Consultants23 Bath BuildingsBristol BS6 5PTUNITED KINGDOMemail:equilibrium@compuserve.com

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The Use of Certification of Sustainable Management Systems and TheirPossible Application to Protected Area Management

Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley

IntroductionAttitudes towards protected areas are undergoing a profound series of changes withrespect to both their aims and performance. Two issues are of particular relevancehere. Firstly, there is an increased emphasis on protected landscapes and seascapes(Category V in the IUCN classification system) and an acceptance that not allprotected areas will be strict nature reserves, but will include other human land useswithin them. Common activities in Category V protected areas include farming,fishing, subsistence hunting and forestry. Many large national parks of WesternEurope are based on this model. Although Category V protected areas are uncommonin many other parts of the world, most large protected areas contain humanpopulations and it is being argued that many might benefit from a Category Vapproach. Similar commercial or subsistence activities may also take place in aCategory VI protected area (an extractive reserve). Secondly, there is a growingawareness of the importance of good management within protected areas andrecognition that this is often not being achieved. Coupled with this is a move todevelop ways of measuring the effectiveness of management as a first stage in bothidentifying problems and identifying ways in which these could be addressed.

It is a prerequisite that “other” land uses within protected areas should be bothsustainable and also compatible with the primary aims of biodiversity conservation,ecological management and, where relevant, cultural protection. (It must also beadmitted that this is not always the case at present.) The need for what might betermed “minimum impact systems” leads naturally towards existing forms ofsustainable or environmentally benign production such as organic farming,ecotourism, managed fisheries and sustainable forest management. Many of thesesustainable uses now operate within well-defined frameworks, including agreedoperating systems, codes of practice and, increasingly, certification.

Certification refers to a procedure, usually voluntary, whereby a commercialenterprise (farm, fishing fleet, forest management unit, etc.) agrees to meet certainstandards and to have its performance checked by an independent inspector. If theinspector is convinced that the enterprise meets the agreed standards, the resultingproducts can carry a symbol to inform consumers, thus gaining extra market share inthe green or fair trade market and, in some cases, a higher price for the product.Organic farming symbols are amongst the best known of these certified “ecolabels”.

There are thus a range of developed or developing certification systems that have, ineffect, detailed criteria and indicators of performance and regular monitoring systems.The current paper examines if, and how, these could support efforts to monitormanagement effectiveness of protected areas.

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How could certification systems be used in protected areas?Given that many protected areas contain other land uses, many of which in turn aresuitable for existing certification systems, can this be used to help improve the overallmanagement effectiveness of the protected area? Several opportunities have beenidentified.

• Encouraging best practice: the so-called “green” certification systems all need toinclude detailed advice about best practice, including standards, manuals and inmost cases a large accompanying literature. In the UK, The Soil Association, thelargest organic sector body, has published additional guidelines specifically aimedat increasing the conservation value of organic farms and produced in associationwith a number of nature conservation organizations (Dudley, 1990). Mostcertification systems have producers’ organizations dedicated to supporting andpromoting the system; for example there are over 500 organic agricultureorganizations around the world. All such systems include steps aimed atminimizing environmental damage and maximizing opportunities for biodiversity:exactly the elements needed on managed land within a protected area. For somecertification schemes, for example organic agriculture, research has now shownpositive benefits to biodiversity (Stolton et al., 2000). The various codes ofpractice available for ecotourism companies also offer source material forprotected area managers addressing issues arising from recreational pressure. Thefirst way in which certification systems can help is therefore by providing a testedframework for land managers to adopt.

• Collection of data: certification schemes include an initial inspection and regular(usually annual) re-inspections to ensure that standards are met and maintained.This requires a considerable expense to the producer, who pays for theinspections, and the development and coordination of a network of trained andexperienced inspectors. This information could be used in more generalassessments of protected areas that include certified operations. The existence ofcertification itself will say quite a lot – for example about the commitment ofland-owners to good management – and the information collected in thecertification process may throw up further useful data: for example about thepresence of “natural areas” or biological corridors left on farms, the level of fishtaken from around a marine protected area or the controls employed byecotourism companies.

• Lessons learned: established certification schemes have already acquired manyyears worth of experience about the technical, economic and philosophicalchallenges of running such a system. There have been conscious attempts to sharethis information, for example between organic agriculture and timber certification(Dudley et al., 1997). Assessment of management effectiveness of protected areas,while remaining slightly different in aims, nonetheless shares many commonelements with certification systems and could learn from the experience of thelatter.

• Protected area certification: the questions of whether or not protected areas aresuitable for some kind of certification scheme, and whether this would bedesirable, remain open to discussion. However, if such schemes are developed,

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existing certification schemes within protected areas could, and should, beincluded within the overall protected area “certification”.

Where could certification be used?Production certification systems could only ever have a use in selected protected areaswhere wider land uses are permitted or encouraged – within Category V and CategoryVI protected areas (Protected Landscape/Seascape and Managed Resource ProtectedArea). There may also be limited use for certification in Category IV reserves(Habitat/Species Management Area) where regular management is required to maintainhabitats to meet the requirements of specific species – for example certification of forestmanagement in cases where this is used to maintain a species-rich cultural landscape. Inthe specific case of ecotourism, certification may have much wider application, in thattourism is permitted and often encouraged in all but Category Ia (Strict NatureReserve/Wilderness Protection) areas.

This also plainly has limitations; certification of production systems is not the same asprotection, and to some extent certification could be used as an excuse for dilutingprotection, particularly in cases where governments or other landowners are alreadytrying to “bend” the definition of protected areas to increase commercial access toresources within protected areas. An early indication of the sort of clash that couldresult is currently seen in Poland, where Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certificationof part of the Bialowieza forest is seen by local NGOs as a sign that the governmentdoes not intend to increase the size of the strictly protected area (Society for BialowiezaForest Protection, 1999). Similarly, in Sri Lanka, a natural forest is currently likely tobe cleared for organic tea production on the edge of a World Heritage Area, creating apotential clash between sustainable production and protection (World RainforestMovement, 2000). Certification will therefore never be a panacea and should not beused as an excuse for business as usual.

In areas where certified processes are compatible with protected area aims, three mainuses have been identified. These are described below and examples given wherepossible.

• Certification of operations within protected areas

Certification within protected areas (related to operations such as organic farms,various forms of management for non-timber forest products and ecotourism) can allhelp to define and control sustainable land uses in those protected areas containingsignificant human populations.

In Europe for example, organic farming is increasingly being adopted withinprotected areas. Promotional work by the Associazione Italiana Agricoltura Biologicawithin regional parks in Italy encouraged 113 farms within protected areas to applyfor certification between 1996 and 1997 (Compagnoni, 2000). Similar developmentshave taken place in the Triglavski National Park in Slovenia (Slabe, 2000) and inseveral protected areas in Hungary (Frühwald, 2000). In the UK the National Trust, aconservation organization that is today also the largest single land owner in thecountry, is now actively encouraging farmers on its land to pursue organic agriculture.

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Forest certification offers similar possibilities. In Mediterranean Europe, thedevelopment of non-timber forest product certification is seen as a way ofencouraging traditional forest management systems that encourage and sustainbiodiversity in cultural landscapes. Seven pilot protected areas are working with theWWF Mediterranean Programme Office, including the Guidiana Valley Natural Parkin Portugal, the Chouf Forest Protected Area in the Lebanon and the Feija NationalPark in Tunisia (Moussouris and Regato, 1999). More traditional timber managementis also a possible candidate for certification within landscape protected areas forexample and members of the organization Coed Cymru (“Welsh woodlands” in theWelsh language) are certified for traditional woodland management within theSnowdonia National Park (Jenkins, pers comm).

The Pan Parks initiative offers a new approach, where protected areas are assessedand certified specifically for their tourism potential. Currently operating in Europe, itaims to create a network of outstanding internationally recognized protected areasoffering unique, high quality nature-based tourism. It is hoped that Pan Parks willbecome widely known as the natural capitals of the continent and the concept is basedon partnership between all actors involved (Anon, 1999). Pan Parks already has somedraft standards (Kun, 2000) and a proposed star rating system (van de Vlasakker,2000).

Certification would also be an ideal framework for approaches in marine protectedareas, where protection often accompanies sustainable, particularly small-scale,fisheries (Wells, 1999). The Marine Stewardship Council has for example completedthe pre-assessment for certification of a cockle fishery operating in a marine protectedarea in South Wales, UK (designations include Special Area of Conservation,National Nature Reserve and Ramsar Site) (Coates pers comm).

• Certification of land uses in the buffer zones of protected areas or in thecorridors of protected area networks

A secondary and closely connected use of certification could be in the buffer zones ofexisting protected areas – where they could also play a role in maintaining theintegrity of protected areas in stricter categories. Buffer zones are, by their nature,areas where land management is tempered to help maintain the integrity of the coreprotected area. As this usually requires some compromises and also often commercialsacrifices by people living or working in the buffer zones, certification of theiroperations could help mitigate this by increasing their market share or allow them acertain mark-up on their products.

This option has been explored most thoroughly in the MesoAmerican BiologicalCorridor, a projected complex of protected areas and sustainable managementstretching over seven countries and involving over a hundred NGOs and over athousand communities. The initiative envisages a range of sustainable land useswithin the buffer zones and linking areas, including certified forest management andorganic agriculture, perhaps with an additional label to show that the products comefrom the biological corridor (Salas pers comm.). Use of organic certification inprotected area buffer zones is also being examined in Europe (Stolton et al., 2000).

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• Creation of additional protected areas as a result of certification

A slightly different side effect of certification is the creation of additional protectedareas directly as a result of stipulations within the standards.

This aspect is most clearly seen at present within the standards of the ForestStewardship Council, where certified operations are obliged to set aside five per centof their forest management unit for protection. Whilst the long-term security of this isstill open to question, as there is no guarantee that the land will remain certifiedindefinitely, the medium term result is that if large areas of forest are certified thenquite apart from the broader environmental gains, there will also be a significantincrease in land under protection.

For example, the fact that the four major forest companies in Sweden are now allcertified by the FSC should add at least 400,000 hectares of additional forest protectedareas to the country’s protected area network (calculated from Dudley et al., 1999).More importantly, it formalizes the concept of establishing protected areas on landowned by private commercial companies. Although this is not a novel concept inScandinavia and has been practised in an ad hoc manner for some time, certification isbringing these ideas into new areas. If such “certification protected areas” could beincorporated into a wider protected area network, for example following the type oflandscape ecological planning being promoted by the Finnish Forest and ParksService, the gains would be even greater.

The extent to which this model can be transposed onto other certification systems –for example in agricultural plantations or with the development of protected areasspecifically for ecotourism – has yet to be explored.

ConclusionsThese ideas are still very new and often at an experimental or even theoretical stage. Itis therefore premature to make firm recommendations about their applicability orfuture use. Further work is still required to determine the real costs and benefits ofcertification; for example so far there has still been no systematic attempt to determinewhether existing forest certification schemes actually increase or protect forestbiodiversity in practice. Some of these questions go beyond protected areas into thegeneral field of sustainable development but relate to their long-term use within oraround protected areas.

Another important question to be addressed is whether current certification schemesby themselves are sufficient to satisfy the requirements within protected areas orwhether some other “layer” of certification is required – either in terms of additionalguidelines or in the form of a separate label as suggested in the MesoAmericanBiological Corridor.

We believe the evidence brought together in this paper is sufficient to show thatprotected area managers, and the World Commission on Protected Areas, should bemaking closer links with existing certification schemes, both in terms of developingadditional expertise and because of the guidelines, information, and potentialverification systems that they can bring to protected areas. Indeed, at a workshop

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between IUCN and the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements(IFOAM) in 1999, participants developed a joint action plan for future collaborativework which suggested that “IUCN should encourage organic agriculture in protectedarea categories where such land use is permitted” and that “IFOAM and IUCN shouldidentify best practice in protected areas and agricultural lands with a view todisseminating these more widely” (Stolton et al., 2000).

One way to develop these ideas would be to arrange more joint meetings orworkshops to bring together key players in existing certification schemes to discussthese with specialists involved in both the management and the assessment ofprotected areas.

References

Anon (1999); Pan Parks vision statement, WWF International, Gland, Switzerland

Coates, Phil (2000); personal communication from the Chief Fisheries Officer

Compagnoni, Antonio (2000); Organic agriculture and agroecology in regional parks,in Stolton et al

Dudley, Nigel (1990); Guidelines for Conservation: Wildlife protection for farmersand growers from the Soil Association Standards for Organic Agriculture, The SoilAssociation, Bristol

Dudley, Nigel, Chris Elliott and Sue Stolton (1997); A framework for environmentallabelling, Environment, 39 (6)

Dudley, Nigel, Sue Stolton and Karin Beland Lindahl (1999); The role of largecompanies in forest protection in Sweden, in Partnerships for Protection, edited bySue Stolton and Nigel Dudley with Biksham Gujja, Bill Jackson, Jean-PaulJeanrenaud, Gonzalo Oviedo, Adrian Phillips, Pedro Rosabal and Sue Wells,Earthscan, London

Frühwald, Ferenc (2000); The development of organic farming in protected areas andbuffer zones in Hungary, in Stolton et al

Jenkins, David (1998); personal communication from Coed Cymru

Kun, Zoltán (2000); Pan Parks Verification – a discussion paper (draft), WWF,Budapest

Moussoris, Yorgos and Pedro Regato (1999); Forest Harvest: Mediterraneanwoodlands and the importance of non-timber forest products to forest conservation,arborvitae supplement, October 1999

Salas, Alberto (1999); presentation to the IUCN forest advisory group meeting, Arles,France, June 1999

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Slabe, Anamaija (2000); The role of organic farming in the rural landscapes andbiodiversity protection in Slovenia, in Stolton et al

Society for Bialowieza Forest Protection (1999); Enlargement of Bialowieza NationalPark (Poland); In Danger – The Last Primeval Forest In The Central EuropeanLowlands, Action Alert 12/20/99, Worldwide Forest/Biodiversity Campaign News,http://forests.org/

Stolton, Sue, Bernward Geier and Jeffrey A McNeely (2000); The RelationshipBetween Nature Conservation, Biodiversity and Organic Agriculture: Proceedings ofan international workshop held in Vignola, Italy 1999, IFOAM, IUCN and WWF,Tholey-Theley Germany and Gland Switzerland

van de Vlasakker, Joep (2000); Pan Parks Star Rating (draft), consultants report toWWF

Wells, Sue [editor] (1999); Creating a Sea Change: The WWF/IUCN Marine Policy,WWF and IUCN, Gland, Switzerland

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Institutionalizing Assessments within Protected Areas ManagementRegimes

Robbie Robinson

AbstractThe incentives and disincentives for different protected areas (PAs) agencies to implement assessmentsof management effectiveness are presented. Attention is drawn to the general belief that the agencies inreal need of critical assessment will be sceptical of assessments as it may reveal deficiencies in theirmanagement and incentives to avoid this are suggested. Ways to get agencies to embrace assessmentsystems are provided as well as some thoughts on how agencies can be assured that a balancedapproach is needed between confidentiality and openness, especially because the assessments need toinvolve other stakeholders (communities, researchers, NGOs, politicians, governments and donors).

The relevance of the evaluation framework is discussed and the necessity of changing the culture ofmanagers to be more reflective, adaptive and self-critical is promoted.

The attempt to institutionalize assessment of management effectiveness in the Uganda WildlifeAuthority's protected area system is presented.

Robbie RobinsonExecutive DirectorUganda Wildlife AuthorityP.O. Box 3530KampalaUGANDAemail:drrobbie@icon.co.za

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Institutionalizing Assessments within Protected Areas ManagementRegimes

Robbie Robinson

Introduction

In the World Commission on Protected Areas' (WCPA) Newsletter No. 78 (1999), David Sheppardwrote that at the WCPA Global Steering Committee meeting (Moscow, July 1999) “it was noted that,protected area agencies are increasingly being asked to 'wipe their own faces'”. I concur, and also withthe rest of his notes that managers should never lose track of why they are in the conservation business.

As we move into the 21st century the work of protected area (PA) agencies and managers is going tobecome more and more complex and in order to conserve the biodiversity, ecological integrity,wilderness and aesthetic charm of Pas, is going to be increasingly demanding. Agencies and managersare going to be held more accountable and the so-called 'paper-parks' are going to come under everincreasing scrutiny.

Assessment of PAs is going to be, and should be, mandatory and it is therefore gratifying to now have a"Framework for Evaluating Management Effectiveness of Protected Areas". Agencies and PAmanagers alike should be encouraged to use the framework. However, to really institutionalizeassessment is going to require commitment from the agencies and managers. In my opinion the WCPAnetwork as well as other incentives can play a role in bringing about the improvement of managementin PAs.

Different Systems

When looking at the various protected area management regimes in a global context they are, as somany other aspects of our environmental endeavours, mainly polarized into developed and developingPA management systems. This is of course a generalization, as there are PA systems which have amixture of both developed and developing management systems and it is probably more accurate to saythat there is a continuum of management systems ranging from developed to developing systems.

Due to my admiration for the Canadian protected areas agency, Parks Canada, in particular, I cite thissystem as an example of the developed PA management system, and the Uganda Wildlife Authority(UWA) as an example of the developing management system. The South African protected areamanagement system can be regarded as a mixture of both developed and developing systems. In allthese examples, and I believe that this is universal, there is an urgent need for assessments to be madeof the management effectiveness of the protected areas.The roles of protected areas are usually grouped into the following:

• Protection of ecological and biological processes• Protection of biodiversity• Providing economic value• As places that provide recreation, spiritual, cultural, historic and aesthetic benefits.

However, there seems to be a fundamental difference in attitude towards both the rationale for theproclamation of the protected area and the assessment, which is reflected in the roles protected areasplay. In the developed systems there is a far greater emphasis placed on protecting ecological integritywhile in the developing systems the emphasis is on the economic value of the protected area. Whateverthe case there is a greater need for conservation agencies and managers to assess their managementeffectiveness and to report on how well they are performing.

The key issue relating to evaluation of management effectiveness is how do we get managementagencies to embrace assessment systems, especially where these may reveal deficiencies in themanagement of PAs. How will agencies respond to NGOs developing assessments and how might

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systems be "built in" to the way managers operate (i.e. changing the culture of managers to be morereflective, adaptive and self-critical)?

Incentives

There are a number of ways to entice agencies and/or PA managers to implement assessments of theirmanagement effectiveness and these can be grouped into two categories, i.e. the 'stick' and the 'carrot'.

The 'stick ' category:

(i) Donor and aid agencies can make it compulsory for PA agencies and managers to implementassessments in order to obtain the required funding.

(ii) Governments can also make it mandatory for conservation organizations to comply with astandard assessment.

(iii) International organization like the World Heritage Bureau, Ramsar etc. could threaten to takethe status away from an area that does not implement an assessment of managementeffectiveness.

(iv) Stakeholders such as neighbouring communities, NGOs and others could demand anassessment of management effectiveness.

The 'carrot' category:

(i) The WCPA secretariat could appeal to the members to implement assessments in the PAs.(ii) Funding by donor and aid agencies could be made more accessible to PA agencies and PAs

that are implementing or are prepared to implement an assessment system.(iii) Governments could encourage the conservation agencies to implement an assessment system.(iv) Assessment systems should be part of the academic curriculum at training centres for PA

managers.(v) It should be seen as the 'right thing to do'.

Disincentive to Assessments being Undertaken

I will not dwell on the disincentives as it is my contention that the benefits of undertaking assessmentsfar outweigh the disincentives. However, many PA agencies and managers may see assessments as athreat, especially where these may reveal deficiencies in their management. PA agencies and managersmay not approve NGOs to develop assessment systems and impose their findings on the agency orprotected area. Managers may also find assessment systems a nuisance and time consuming.

Using Evaluation to Support Management

Evaluation can be used in several ways to support management, for example in:

(i) Adaptive management(ii) Improving accountability(iii) Improving the planning(iv) Justifying additional funding.

These aspects are also covered in the framework discussion document (Hockings, Stolton and Dudley,2000).

What is Needed from the Pa Agencies and Managers to Implement an Assessment System?

What little we know about the management effectiveness of PAs suggests that many protected areas arenot in particularly good shape, suffering from a variety of threats and, in some cases, in danger oflosing the very values for which they were set aside in the first place. Others exist in name only - theso-called "paper-parks" that exist as lines on the map but have never actually been implemented –wilderness areas fragmented by the very people that are paid to protect them.

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Agencies and managers need to be far more committed to the important task they are being paid toperform. A change in culture needs to be manifested in the way these operate. A culture of openness,transparency and self-reflection inculcated into the ethos of all agencies and managers.

Naturally, when it comes to certain issues, performance of the individual for example, then there isneed for confidentiality. However, the assessment should be totally open and be approached by boththe evaluator and the PA being evaluated, in a supportive way.

The system of evaluation needs to be globally accepted in order for comparisons to be made and toshare lessons learned.

A useful framework has been developed by the WCPA's Management Effectiveness Task (Hockings,Stolton and Dudley, 2000).

This framework entails the following elements:

• Context - Where are we now?• Planning (Design) - Where do we want to be?• Inputs - What do we want to be?• Processes - How do we go about it?• Outputs - What were the results?• Outcomes - What did we achieve?

(See Table 1 of Hockings et al. p.209)

The framework provides a useful tool for organizing information and designing an assessment system.It has several attractive features for managers and agencies including flexibility and usefulness atdifferent levels.

Advantages of the framework are:

• easier for comparison between sites• sharing lessons learned• maximizing the benefits of assessment if there is some measure of consistency and basic

operational principles.

The framework can also be useful in guiding decision making and prioritizing interventions (Ervin,1999). The elements of the framework lend themselves to a decision tree (See Fig. 1).

The framework provides for all PA agencies and managers to use the same terminology and allows forcomparisons to be made. It can be used to identify appropriate management and policy interventions.

The framework provides a conceptually clear and useful tool, suited for several purposes. It should beconsidered as the global framework.

From the outset, the evaluator/assessor should be explicit about how it plans to use the informationgenerated by assessing protected areas, as well as how others (e.g. funding agencies) may use theinformation. In particular they must be clear on whether it plans to provide or leverage support forpoorly managed protected areas, withhold funding from poorly managed areas, distribute theinformation publicly, or simply use the information to measure its own campaign goals. In addition, itshould seek to understand the possible unintended consequences of linking donor funding to thisassessment.

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Is the protectedarea,and/or theprotected areasystemadequate?

Are resourcesadequate?

Are managementprocessessound?

Are outputsadequate?

Do outcomesmeet theprotected area’sobjectives?

nooo

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

no

no

no

Create additionalprotected areas.Add to existingareas.Reconfigure designand layout,increase bufferzones

Increase qualityand quantity ofinfrastructure, staff,funding, overallresources Provide training

support.Increaseaccountability ofmanagers and staff

Identify gaps and problemareas.Evaluate managementplanning.Identify causes forinadequate outputs.

no

FFiigg.. 11 DDeecciissiioonn ttrreeee ffoorrmmaannaaggeemmeenntt aanndd ppoolliiccyyiinntteerrvveennttiioonnss..

Identify underlying external causes. Revisitmanagement plan and objectives. Lobby for broaderpolicy changes (e.g. land use planning).

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An Example: The Uganda Wildlife Authority

At the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) a central spatial Monitoring Information System (MIST) hasbeen developed to provide managers at four levels of decision making (Protected Areas, UWAHeadquarters, Board of Trustees and Ministry) with up-to-date information. The central informationsystem ensures consistency of data from all the PAs in the UWA system of protected areas and allowsefficient maintenance of the database. The development of this computer-based system followed abottom-up approach with the field staff being involved from the start.

The institutionalizing and implementation of management effectiveness are being envisaged byintegrating spatial and non-spatial geographic data into MIST and addressing managementeffectiveness at the different levels i.e. PA, UWA Headquarter, Board of Trustees and Ministry level(See Fig. 2).

Conclusions

• There is quite obviously a need for appraising management effectiveness and urgency for itsgeneral and global adoption by both conservation agencies and PA managers.

• A cultural change is a prerequisite and a necessity for the adoption and implementation of anassessment of management effectiveness. There is a need for both conservation agencies and PAmanagers to be more transparent and open in their management styles without having tocompromise on essential confidential detail.

• The system of assessment must not be too complex or time consuming.

• The system of evaluation needs to be globally accepted for comparisons to be made and to sharelessons learnt.

• The WCPA network can play an important role in institutionalizing assessments in protected areaand the management agencies.

References

Ervin, J (1999) Recommendations to WWF regarding the development of a system for evaluating themanagement effectiveness of Protected Areas Worldwide. (Draft report to WWF International. J. Ervin.Revised July 21,1999).

Hockings, M, Stolton, S and. Dudley, N (2000) Evaluating Effectiveness: AFramework for Assessing Management of Protected Areas. Draft for Discussion -March 2000

Sheppard, D (1999) WCPA Newsletter No 78, June 1999. IUCN Gland, Switzerland.

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ManagementProtected Areas

Data collectionand processing

Data

ManagementBoard of Trustees

Data

ManagementUWA HQ

DataManagement

Ministry

Data sheets

GPS(waypoints)

Database

OziExplorerGPS software

Waypoint mapsfor individual

patrols

Data provision. Data entry and import (only protected areas and UWA HQ)

Data transfer (digital) and import

Data for the consolidation of the decentralized databases

Information for management decision making - maps, graphics, tables, reports

Access to information at protected area level

Access to the information system through the UWA computer network and Intranet

Access to the information system through direct dial in and the Internet

The box on the left gives an example of datacollection and processing based on data fromranger patrols.

Data Dataprocessing Output

Fig. 2 Data and information flow and user access the in UWA Monitoring Information System (MIST)

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The Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Areas

Jamison Ervin

AbstractProtected area managers and policy makers increasingly need assessment tools thatare fast, reliable, and cost-effective. This paper presents a rapid assessment andprioritization methodology that enables policy makers to 1) assess the managementeffectiveness of a particular protected area; 2) compare the effectiveness of a numberof protected areas within a region or country; and 3) establish policy priorities basedon this assessment. The methodology, based on a framework developed by the WorldCommission on Protected Areas, includes an assessment of the efficacy of existingmanagement practices, the severity and likelihood of external threats, the level ofintegrity within protected areas, and the macro policy environment. Themethodology, which was a collaborative effort between WWF Forests for LifeCampaign and the WWF/World Bank Alliance, has been field tested in five countries.

This paper presents the rapid assessment and prioritization methodology, examinesthe results of the field testing, and discusses the implication for future assessments.

Jamison ErvinPresidentHardscrabble Associates1061 MountainviewWaterbury VT 05676UNITED STATESemail: jervin@sover.net

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The Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Areas

Jamison Ervin

IntroductionMany protected areas worldwide are seriously threatened, even as they are expected toprovide an ever-expanding array of environmental benefits and services. A recentstudy, for example, cites encroachment, logging, grazing, mining, poaching, fire,invasive species, and pollution as just some of the threats to protected areas (Stoltonand Dudley, 1999). Yet many protected areas are inadequately equipped to handlethese threats. Some studies estimate the need to triple existing protected area budgetsthroughout much of Asia, Africa and South America (James, 1999). At the sametime, protected areas are increasingly expected to provide logs, fuelwood, fodder,game, medicinal products, income to fund park management, and a pristineecotourism experience, complete with charismatic mega-fauna viewing opportunities– all while supporting a bastion of diverse species and natural communities, amidst achanging landscape that is less and less able to do so.

These pressures underscore the importance of evaluating and prioritizing protectedareas. Yet traditional assessment methods are often expensive and time-consuming,and do not provide policy makers with the strategic information they need in order toidentify which protected areas face the most serious threats, and which should receivethe highest priority.

In recognition of this problem and in response to their own programme needs, theWorld Wide Fund for Nature and the WWF/World Bank Alliance have developed amethod for rapidly assessing the management effectiveness of protected area systems.This assessment tool can provide accountability to a broad conservation community;identify strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities; track improvements overtime; and prioritize funding and policy interventions.

Based on a framework developed by the World Commission on Protected Areas(WCPA), the rapid assessment method discussed here is consistent with what WCPAcalls a “Level 1” analysis – the focus is primarily on existing data with somesupplementation, and the findings are useful for broad, comparative purposes(Hockings, 2000). This rapid assessment method is not intended to be used for an in-depth, field-intensive “Level 3” analysis, although it can be helpful in identifyingwhere such assessments should take place.

The WCPA framework identifies six main elements of assessment: context, planning,inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes (Hockings, 2000). The rapid assessmentmethod includes each of these elements, as illustrated in the table below.

TABLE 1: Framework for the Rapid Assessment Methodology

Context Design andPlanning

Inputs Processes Outputs Outcomes

External threats

Biologicalsignificance

Macro policy

Management planning

Protected area design

Staffing

Funding

Supervision

Monitoring

Facilities

Education

PA integrity

Extent ofdegradation

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This paper outlines the steps involved in implementing the rapid assessment, presentsthe indicators for each element, and explains the various policy and conservationanalyses yielded by the assessment. The examples used in this paper are drawn fromfield testing in three countries. The methodology was applied to four protected areasin Algeria, five in Cameroon, and five in Gabon; these areas are designated as A1through A4, C1 through C5, and G1 through G5 in the examples used throughout thispaper (see Appendix A for an overview of the areas field tested).

Assessment Process

Step 1: Identify the protected areas to be included within the assessment

The first step is to decide whether and how to limit the number of protected areas tobe included in the assessment process. In countries with many protected areas, theassessment team may decide to limit the number of protected areas to be included inthe assessment on the basis of size, management status, IUCN category, biologicalimportance, or regional distribution.

Step 2: Assess existing data for each of the protected areas in the assessment

The second step is to analyse the quality and quantity of existing data on each of theprotected areas included in the assessment. Many countries may have alreadyconducted studies on the management effectiveness and prioritization of protectedareas. Results from these studies can be directly incorporated into WWF'sassessment methodology, provided the information is from a credible source, is up-to-date, and provides the relevant information.

Step 3: Gather information for any data gaps

The third step in the methodology is to gather information for any data gaps.Depending on the extent of the information gaps, the assessment team mayrecommend telephone consultations to fill minor information gaps, a questionnaireadministered to protected area managers for moderate information gaps, or aworkshop for major information gaps.

In many cases, a questionnaire of protected area managers will be necessary. Incountries that lack clear and explicit analyses on conservation and policy priorities,a workshop of protected area managers and government officials may also help toensure the relevancy and appropriateness of any follow up recommendations. Iftime, funding, and interest allow, a panel of independent experts can review andprovide comments on the data gathered. In areas with a high degree of controversyregarding the management and prioritization of protected areas, this step mayprovide some measure of credibility and independent review.

Step 4: Analyse findings

The fourth step is to analyse each of the six assessment areas (context, design,inputs, processes, outputs, and outcomes), using existing information as well as

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data gathered in supplementary questionnaires. The information is thensynthesized to produce seven different types of analyses:

§ Overall vulnerability§ Severity of threat§ Severity of degradation§ Capacity for improvement§ Conservation priority§ Likelihood of success§ Policy priority

Step 5: Identify next steps and priorities based on findings

The fifth step is to identify next steps based on the findings of the assessment. Suchfindings may include:

• Recommended changes to the macro policy environment• Specific targets to improve management effectiveness of protected areas• Identification of protected areas under threat• Identification of conservation priorities• Identification of policy changes and strategies• An assessment of required increases in funding, staffing and infrastructure

Indicators for each assessment element

Below are the indicators for each area of assessment. These answers can beascertained on the basis of existing studies, workshop results, or questionnairesadministered to protected area managers.

CONTEXTExternal Threats1. Is the protected area surrounded by either an intact, legally recognized buffer

zone, or by an area of undisturbed forest lands at least 20 per cent larger than theprotected area?

2. Are the communities living in or near the protected area supportive of theobjectives of the protected area?

3. How likely are a variety of threats to happen within the protected area over thenext five years?

4. How widespread and serious is each of these threats likely to be within the nextfive years?

Biological Significance5. Is the protected area representative of a globally threatened ecosystem?6. Does the protected area contain globally rare, threatened, or endangered species?7. Does the protected area contain regionally or locally rare, threatened, or

endangered species?8. Does the protected area have unusually high biodiversity, relative to other

protected areas in the country?

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9. Does the protected area have an unusually high number of endemic species, relativeto other protected areas in the country?

10. Does the protected area serve a critical landscape function (e.g. migration corridor,feeding area) within a national or regional protected area network?

11. Is the protected area considered large for the country?

DESIGN AND PLANNINGMacro policy12. Is the legal status of the protected area clear and permanent?13. Do national laws and policies support the effective management of the protected area?14. Are staff authorized to enforce protected area laws?

Management Planning15. Is there an up-to-date management plan for the protected area?16. Is there a natural resource inventory for the protected area?17. Is there a plan that identifies current threats, areas of degradation, and prevention,

mitigation and restoration activities?18. Are there policies regarding local participation in planning, conflict resolution, and

local employment opportunities?

Protected area design19. Is the location and layout of the protected area based on scientific principles and field

assessments?20. Is the protected area large enough to sustain a population of critical species within the

protected area?21. Is the protected area part of an inter-connected network of protected areas or other

conservation lands?

INPUTS22. Is funding sufficient to ensure adequate numbers of staff, communications equipment

and transportation infrastructure, in order to carry out critical management activities?

PROCESSES23. Do the staff have adequate experience, supervision and training to carry out critical

management activities?24. Do staff regularly monitor the impacts of legal and illegal uses of the protected areas?25. Are the results of monitoring and on-going research incorporated into future

management planning and activities?

OUTPUTS26. Is there an active community education and/or outreach programme?27. Is the boundary of the protected area clearly demarcated and agreed upon by local

communities?28. Are the protected area facilities adequate to meet the objectives of the protected area?

OUTCOMES29. Has the forest cover remained intact over the last five years?30. What is the extent of degradation to trees, fauna, understory plants, and soils?31. What is the primary cause of degradation to trees, fauna, understory plants, and soils?

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CONSERVATION AND POLICY ANALYSES

Severity of threatThe severity of threat is a combination of the extent of any particular threat, and thelikelihood of that threat occurring. This analysis can help managers and policymakers identify grave, critical, serious, and guarded threats, as well as calculate theoverall average of all threats. Threats identified in the questionnaire include grazing,road development, poaching, mining, logging, fire, invasive species, conversion toagriculture, encroachment, widescale disturbances, and natural processes. Whenexamining the average of threats across multiple protected areas, policy makers canbegin to detect trends and patterns across regions. For example, in the charts below,El Kala faces five grave threats (those that are both very likely to happen and to bewidespread), while Minkebe Reserve in Gabon faces none. This trend is reflected inthe composite of all 14 protected areas.

Overall vulnerabilityCalculating the overall vulnerability of a protected area requires two pieces ofinformation; the first is the degree of threat (guarded, serious, critical or grave), thesecond is the existence or absence of a functioning buffer and/or strong communitysupport. The result is an index between 1 (very secure) and 8 (very vulnerable).

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Buffer and/or Vulnerability index community support

Yes NoThreat average is guarded or serious, but no grave or criticalthreats 1 2

Threat average is guarded or serious, and at least one critical 3 4Threat average is critical, but no grave threats 5 6Presence of at least one grave threat 7 8

Conservation priorityThe conservation priority can be determined by combining the level of vulnerability(see above) with the area’s biological importance. Points are scored for biologicalimportance according to whether the area represents globally rare communities orspecies, high biodiversity or endemism, performs a critical landscape function, or islocally rare. Graphing these two indices allows policy makers to determine therelative importance and level of conservation priority for each protected area. Theconservation priority for each of the 14 protected areas is displayed below.

Severity and permanence of degradationThe severity of degradation of a protected area is a combination of the extent ofdegradation with the permanence of the degradation . Each cause of degradationcan be assigned a permanence value, based on how permanent the damage is likelyto be. For example, mining is likely to receive a score closer to –5, while tourismand the gathering of non-timber forest products is likely to receive a score closer to5. Each assessment team may want to assign different values depending on localcircumstances. The result is a graph that shows the overall severity of degradationto trees, plants, fauna and soils, expressed from 1st degree (mild) to 4th degree(severe) degradation.

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Management CapacityThis analysis measures the probability of a protected area being well managed, basedon both the existing level of management effectiveness and the macro policyenvironment. Where management effectiveness and capacity is low, and the macropolicy does not support sound management practices, the outlook for strong long-termmanagement of the protected area is poor; where both are high the outlook isexcellent. Below is a summary of all 14 protected areas from the field testingexercise.

Environmental management outlookSimilarly, the outlook for environmental management (e.g. restoration of degradedareas) is a measure of the probability of the efficacy of management activities. Thismeasure is a combination of the severity of degradation within the protected area (1st,2nd, 3rd or 4th degree) and the tractability, or manageability, of the cause ofdegradation. The tractability is determined by such factors as the level of funding andstaff needed to control, mitigate, restore or prevent the problem, as well as the social,economic and political complexity involved in taking those measures. Where thecause of degradation cannot easily be managed and the degradation is severe, theoutlook for success is poor; where both are high, the outlook is excellent. Forexample, controlling or mitigating widescale processes such as global climate change

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and acid rain is likely to warrant a score close to –5, whereas controlling tourism andpoaching may prove much easier.

Likelihood of successCapacity and environmental management outlook, as described in the previousanalysis, can be combined to express the degree of difficulty and complexity – andtherefore likelihood of success – of a policy intervention. The result is a graph thatexpresses the likelihood of success in policy intervention and implementation.

Priority for policy interventionThe final analysis is an assessment of the priority for policy intervention. Thismeasure is a combination of the conservation priority (critical, high, moderate, or low)with the likelihood of success (very likely, likely, somewhat unlikely, and veryunlikely). The result is a graph, as shown below, that displays the priority fordeveloping and undertaking policy and management interventions in a protected area,relative to other protected areas in the country. The priority is ranked as low,moderate, high, or critical.

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Conclusions

The value of any rapid assessment tool lies in its ability to enable policy makers tomake efficient, effective decisions. A rapid assessment method such as the onedescribed here can provide the kind of broad-level information needed to make suchdecisions. However, a rapid assessment system should complement, not replace,more in-depth, traditional evaluations. In addition, the results of a rapid assessmentshould be regarded not as an end point for evaluating protected areas, but as a startingpoint for identifying next steps and priorities for the future.

References

Berrahmouni, N. 2000. “Testing WWF Draft Methodology for the Rapid Assessmentof Management Effectiveness and Prioritization of Protected Areas: Algeria CaseStudy.” Unpublished report to WWF International, Gland Switzerland.

Hakizumwami, E. 2000. “WWF Methodology for the Rapid Assessment ofManagement Effectiveness and Prioritization of Protected Areas: The Results of theTest in Central Africa.” Unpublished report to WWF International, Gland,Switzerland.

Hockings, M. 2000. “Evaluating Management Effectiveness: A Framework forEvaluating Management of Protected Areas.” Unpublished Paper. IUCN WorldCommission on Protected Areas Management Effectiveness Task Force. Gland,Switzerland.

James, A. 1999. “Institutional Constraints to Protected Area Funding.” In Parks.Vol.9, No.2. June.

Stolton, S. and Dudley, N. 1999. A Preliminary Survey of Management Status andThreats in Forest Protected Areas. In Parks. Vol.9, No.2. June.

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APPENDIX 1: Summary of protected areas assessed

ALGERIA Size CategoryBelezma (A1) 26,250 ha IUCN IIDjurDjura (A2) 18,850 ha IUCN IIEl Kala (A3) 78,400 ha IUCN IITheniet el had (A4) 3,245 ha IUCN II

CAMEROON Size CategoryBanyang Mbo Wildlife Sanctuary (C1) 665 km2 IUCN IVCampo Ma’an National Park (C2) 2,640 km2 IUCN IIDja Wildlife Reserve (C3) 5,260 km2 IUCN IVDouala-Edea Wildlife Reserve (C4) 1,600 km2 IUCN IVKorup National Park (C5) 1,259 km2 IUCN II

GABON Size CategoryGamba Protected Area Complex (G1) 10,500 km2 IUCN IVIpassa-Mokuku Strict Reserve 150 km2 IUCN ILa Lope-Okanda Wildlife Reserve 5,360 km2 IUCN IVMinkebe Reserve 6,000 km2 IUCN IVWonga Wongue Presidential Reserve 4,800 km2 IUCN IV

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Management Effectiveness and Institutional Credibility - Assessment ofmanagement effectiveness of protected areas in Finland

Stig Johansson

AbstractThe Finnish protected area system covers 3.5 million hectares. The country is implementing theEuropean Natura-2000 programme, which requires about 500 million Euros of government financingbetween 1996 and 2007. Political pressure to reduce taxation and public sector spending is growing.Therefore, the level of operational financing has not followed the increase in tasks and the number ofprotected areas. Agencies, such as the Forest and Park Service Nature Protection, which manages 3.1million hectares of conservation areas, must be able to prove their effectiveness to be credible andqualify for future financing. Administration also requires assessment of management effectiveness. In1999, the Forest and Park Service started developing a system focussing initially on criteria andindicators for PA management. An important aim was to develop a system, which is based on existingprocedures rather than new tasks. The work has shown that these cannot be developed withoutreviewing planning, reporting and information systems. A more project-oriented modus operandi canfacilitate assessment. Preliminary indicators have been determined and will be tested during 2000.

Stig JohanssonRegional DirectorMetsähallitus-Forest and Park ServiceNatural Heritage Services Southern FinlandP.O. Box 94FIN-01301 VantaaFINLANDemail: stig.johansson@metsa.fi

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Management Effectiveness and Institutional Credibility - Assessment ofmanagement effectiveness of protected areas in Finland

Stig Johansson

Protected Area Management in Finland

Metsähallitus – the Forest and Park Service (FPS) is a state enterprise responsible for the managementof state-owned land in Finland. Its main task has been forestry but with the rapid growth of protectedareas during the last 20 years nature conservation has become increasingly important. Presently FPSmanages about 8.8 million hectares of which 55% are commercial forests, 14% or 1.3 million hectaresstatutory protected areas (PA), 5% areas to be established, 16% wilderness areas in the north of thecountry, and 10% other special areas. This includes 29 national parks (684,000 hectares), 14 strictnature reserves (144,000 hectares) and some 335 other statutory protected areas. The Finnish ForestryResearch Institute also manages some protected areas although there are plans to consolidatemanagement of all state owned PAs into FPS. Protected areas established on private lands, which onlyrepresent a small proportion of the national protected area network, are supervised and controlled bythe Regional Environment Centres under the Ministry of Environment (MoE).

The FPS includes business operations, such as forestry, real estate, nature tourism, seed and plantproduction and consulting, and Nature Protection (FPS-NP), which is budget funded. FPS is supervisedby the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MoAF), while Nature Protection is supervised by theMoE. FPS annual turnover is about 166 million Euros, and employs about 2,300 staff.

FPS-NP is organized into five regional Natural Heritage Services. The main tasks are: (1) Directing useof PAs; (2) Management and restoration of species and habitats; (3) Customer service and natureinterpretation; (4) Influencing land use; and (5) International activities and assignments. Apart from thestatutory protected areas, the Natural Heritage Services manage areas acquired to become statutoryPAs, seven recreation areas (38,000 hectares), and 12 wilderness areas. The annual expenditure of theFPS-NP is approximately 13.6 million Euro. An additional 4.9 million Euro are spent on recreationservices.

FPS Nature Protection is presently developing a system for assessing management effectiveness. Thispaper presents the background and process. It further discusses some of the premises and issues, whichhave emerged during the work so far. The proposal was discussed by the FPS-NP in early May. Theaim is to introduce systematic assessment of management effectiveness from the beginning of nextyear.

A Changing Framework for Conservation Management

During the past ten years, FPS, with a forestry history going back some 140 years, has rapidly changedfrom a very traditional government department into a state enterprise. The government bureaucracy hasbeen transformed into a business-like operation. Simultaneously FPS-NP has grown in operationalvolume, organizational role and importance. Although there are strict financial boundaries between thebusiness areas and the budget-funded conservation, their criteria and characteristics have influencedand benefited conservation considerably. These changes have also increased the pressure to justifycosts and operations and introduce measures to assess management efficiency.

The increase in protected areas, including the growing role of conservation and economic activitieslinked to conservation and protected areas, has also rapidly changed the environment in whichconservation organizations and institutions operate in Finland. It has meant larger areas to manage,more demand on services, growing volume of work and, until recently, growing public sectorfinancing. Moreover, until recently, conservation programmes were not fully implemented in the fieldbut rather based on reservations in land-use planning or government approved conservationprogrammes, without purchase or compensation for foregone rights to private landowners.

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Finland joined the European Union (EU) in 1995, which has had two major impacts for conservation.Firstly, Finland contributed about 4.77 million hectares and 1,457 sites to the European Natura-2000protected area network. The site selection was a very complicated political and socio-economic processbecause of the predominantly private land ownership, which lead to unforeseen controversy betweenprivate landowners and conservation. Because of the controversy, the government rapidly decided tofinance the acquisition of land for the state or to compensate private landowners for conservation onprivate land. A total of 3.2 billion Finnish Marks, equal to about 500 million Euros, was allocated forthis purpose for the period between 1996 and 2007. FPS was given the task of contributing one thirdthrough land-exchange or sale of state-owned land and purchase of conservation areas. This has had aconsiderable negative impact on operational funding and again stressed the need to be able to assessmanagement effectiveness and provide information and statistics on activities and cost efficiency.

Secondly, the EU membership opened up new mechanisms for financing conservation, and the EU-Lifeprogramme introduced projects as a way of working for the first time in the true sense. Joining the EUhas also changed rural attitudes towards conservation. Despite the initial strong resistance, probablydue to the reduction of agricultural subsidies and the forced expansion of the scope of the ruraleconomies. Nature tourism has become the hope for rural areas and hence the use of national parks andother protected areas as a foundation for nature tourism has received increasing interest in the localgovernment and the private sector. This tendency has been supported by the availability of financialmechanisms for rural development provided by the EU.

Finally, the role of government is changing. The public service role applies increasingly only to well-defined and justified areas (education, basic health care, etc.) with the government moving away fromoperational activities. Where it remains operational, business criteria are increasingly gaining ground.There is also a continuous and growing pressure in society to reduce the level of taxation and publicsector spending.

All these changes reflect upon the institutions, such as FPS, which manage the protected areas networkin Finland. Effectiveness in management has become a matter of institutional survival and there are twomain areas particularly where this can be seen. FPS and other public sector institutions need to:

1. Justify the mission and existence of the institution in society2. Use the limited public sector resources in the most cost-effective way in relation to their mission

and objectives.

Initiating Assessment at FPS Nature Protection

Since the transformation of FPS into a state enterprise in 1992, FPS-NP has been rapidly forced todevelop organization, administration and management procedures. The tasks and operations have beenanalysed and described in process flow charts. Standards and priorities have been set for a number ofissues e.g. use of PAs for visitor use and nature interpretation, recreation services, biodiversityinformation needs etc. Still, however, many issues require more detailed analysis, especially of theirinter-linkages and procedures in order to improve their appropriateness and effectiveness. In 1999,strategies were developed for Nature Protection for the period 1999-2000 relating to: (1) Competition(financing, stakeholders, management effectiveness, skills); (2) Conservation (biodiversity information,management planning, Natura-2000 implementation and monitoring, strategy for the Balticarchipelago); (3) Recreation services (priority setting, increase customers, support to nature tourism);(4) Customer service (improve service and contacts, increase FPS visibility); and (5) Internationalcontacts (cross-border and EU co-operation).

Assessment of management effectiveness was considered one of the main issuesaffecting competition and financing. The main purpose was to develop a way in whichto assess how successfully the FPS-NP operates and how well it responds to:

1. The needs and expectations of society and customers2. The goals set by the supervising ministries (MoE, MoAF)3. The mission, values, vision and strategic goals of the FPS and Nature Protection4. Other issues affecting nature conservation in Finland.

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Another primary aim of assessing management effectiveness was to serve themanagement of FPS-NP. The first initial review of the situation showed thatmanagement effectiveness could not be addressed without reviewing the planning andreporting procedures or information systems. Important issues were that:

1. Statistics and long-term, time series data was not readily available2. Annual Work Plans were descriptive and not based on logical framework planning3. Annual reporting was descriptive and loosely linked to the work plans4. Links between planning levels (strategic, annual, management) were weak5. Financial planning and monitoring were weakly linked to operational planning

and monitoring6. Information systems were not sufficiently supporting planning and reporting

procedures7. Standards and priorities had not been systematically set.

Although many of the above procedures and information were in place they were notsufficiently inter-linked, and they did not allow for easy aggregation of information orinformation had to be specifically collected and generated for assessment purposes.

Assessment Focus

The prime focus of the FPS assessment system is on the organization - on assessingits ability to manage the state-owned protected areas. Another basic and importantcriterion was that in order to be sustainable, the assessment must be built on existingroutines, which are relevant in relation to the mission and objectives. Such“mandatory” routines are e.g. annual planning and budgeting, performance andfinancial reporting. Furthermore, assessment should especially be made part of theland ownership and management-related information systems and employment andpersonnel routines.

The proposed system is not aimed at assessing the efficiency and impact of theprotected area network in Finland. This is done in a separate national study conductedby the Finnish Environment Institute. It is also not aimed at producing information forthe sake of information and statistics for international or national use nor geared todeveloping a complete and comprehensive system for purpose of businessmanagement or accreditation, although it should be possible to take such issues intoaccount in the future.

One of the reasons for this focus is the experience from the certified environmentalmanagement system based on the ISO14001 standard, which FPS introduced in 1997,and from other comprehensive systems (e.g. IT-systems) and large databases (e.g.GIS). These tend easily to become heavy, time consuming and costly. They also havea tendency of feeding themselves. Consequently, an increasing part of the workbecomes internal and is spent maintaining and developing systems and procedures,because of the rapid and perpetual changes in the IT environment, FPS as anorganization, and other changes in the operational environment.

The focus is also not on individual parks or protected areas, because FPS operates ona national scale and protected area management is based on regional administration,

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rather than site or park-based administration. This must be handled through amanagement planning process. With stagnating funding and a subsequent situation atFPS, where both staffing and funding remain limited, it would not make sense todevelop assessment procedures, which would add new routines and require additionalwork. For example the Southern Finland Natural Heritage Services manage ninenational parks, one strict nature reserve and more than two hundred other conservationareas, covering more than 65,000 hectares of an administrative area of 3.9 millionhectares, with a permanent staff of 23. All this runs with a recurrent budget of about1.4 million Euro/year. This means about 2,600 hectares/staff, 10 PAs/staff and 20Euro/hectares, while half of Finland’s population live in the area and the PAs andinformation centres are visited by close to 400,000 people per year.

The risk is that unless such a system to assess management effectiveness is put inplace as part of the routine it could become difficult to sustain it.

Types of Assessments

Preliminary work was done between May and September 1999 defining the issues and tasks. InSeptember, the site assessment form presented by Hockings (1997) was tested, although withoutmodifying it to suit Finnish conditions and issues. Management effectiveness was also discussed at twoworkshops during the visit of Marc Hocking to Finland in September. Based on further work by a teamat FPS, a preliminary proposal was discussed in March and May this year. The following types ofassessment were proposed and discussed:

International evaluationIndependent international evaluations of FPS-NP should be conducted with approximately ten-yearintervals. These should be commissioned by the MoE in collaboration with FPS. The previous one wasconducted in 1994. The aim is to compare FPS operations in relation to relevant agencies in othercountries, and to review how international conservation goals, agreements and standards are applied inFinland.

National evaluationIn the interim, between the international assessments, an independent national evaluation is conductedwith ten-year intervals. These should be commissioned by the MoE in collaboration with FPS. Thepurpose is to increase the national perspective, and at the same time review the relevance and how therecommendations of the international review are implemented.

Feedback from ministerial supervision and monitoringFPS-Nature Protection prepares an interim report to the MoE by September and a final annual report byFebruary. In addition, to this there are supervision meetings with MoE and tri-partite meetings withMoAF and MoE every quarter. There is no systematic procedure for assessment. Criteria and indicatorsfor assessing management effectiveness should be determined in connection with the presentation anddiscussion of the FPS-Nature Conservation Annual Work Plan proposal to the MoE. A questionnairewill also be prepared for annual feedback from the ministries on the performance and role of FPS-NP.

Annual Work Plans and the Annual ReportThe Natural Heritage Services base their work on Annual Work Plans. Although the basic structure issimilar, they are not completely standardized in structure and content. Some are also rather descriptive,which also makes it difficult to present aggregate information at the FPS-NP level. FPS-NatureProtection prepares an Annual Report, which also is rather descriptive, although standardized,quantitative information is on the increase, but not sufficiently linked to the Annual Work Plans.

A standardized structure for the Annual Work Plan and Annual Report will be prepared and made morequantitative and “table-like” with clear, preferably measurable targets for the year. The plan and reportshould contain the same information and support each other. They should also form the basis for

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assessing management effectiveness in the short-term, one-year perspective. The new format should beintroduced during next year’s planning exercise starting in September/October this year.

Protected area management plansSite and protected area management is primarily based on management plans. Presently these are toobulky, extensive and descriptive to be effectively used to assess management effectiveness. They arealso not effectively used to support annual planning. However, for some of the development projectsinitiated during 1999 the strategic-planning exercise was to review protected area managementplanning. The work is still in progress but the aim will be to make the management plans more project-oriented with clear goals, timeframes and specified inputs and budgets. This would both increase theirutility as a basis for Annual Work Plans and budgets as well as a basis for assessing performance andeffectiveness at the site level.

External surveysPresently, external surveys are used at FPS to assess how the employees experience their work, togauge motivation and corporate atmosphere and how staff experience the corporate mission, values,goals and operations. This is done every second year and provides a sufficient basis to assess the statusand performance of part of the personnel domain. However, similar systematic and repeated surveysshould be introduced to assess the impact in the customer domain, particularly customer satisfactionaspects (PA visitors, information centre visitors, web-site visitors etc.). The supervisory group, whichoversees national-scale customer service at FPS, will work out the final assessment procedures, criteriaand indicators together with the staff working at information centres during the year.

Self-assessmentsFPS-NP tested the WCPA/IUCN site assessment form in an unmodified form in 1999. The testingrevealed some weaknesses in management which were known but had not been addressed. Thefeedback from field testing was that it had to be modified to suit Finnish conditions but that it could beused to assess the status of PA management, especially if repeated over time. Similar self-assessmentbased on scorecards has also been used to evaluate the customer service at FPS-NP information centres.

Timeframe and Assesment

In choosing how the assessments should be made at FPS the degree to which they are based on existingplanning horizons and procedures is most important. The FPS approach proposed focusing on threemain timeframes:

Long-term assessment (5 – 10 years)On this time scale, the aim is to review against the mission of FPS-NP. Although there is no clearplanning instrument, decisions are made, based on periodic review or policy changes. Reporting andmonitoring are conducted as part of the process of ministerial supervision. An FPS assessment will bedone by systematically collecting time-series data and statistics on issues, which are crucial for theorganization. Such issues are, for example, financial trends, development of managed area, personnel,visitors, etc. This data and these indicators should be robust and preferably not be affected by changesin organization, administration etc. Another form of assessment on this time-scale is the proposedexternal evaluations. This should also form the basic information foundation, which states who we areand what we do. It is information on status and change rather than a measure for achieving set goalsand targets.

Medium-term assessment (2-3 years)At FPS this planning perspective refers to strategic planning and normally looks 2-3 years ahead. Thestrategic goals vary, sometimes considerably from one exercise to the other depending on changes inthe operation environment. A good example at FPS-NP of such a change is the “funding crisis”, whichrapidly emerged during 1999 as a permanent feature for the next 5-6 years. This will remain until theland purchasing programme for conservation areas is completed in 2007. Until 1999/2000 there washope for an increase in funding along with the increase of new areas to manage, but now dealing withfunding has become one of the main strategic issues.

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This means that the vision for a 5-year period and the strategic goals for the 2-3 year strategy periodhave to be measurable and that indicators have to be set in a logical framework planning process.Because of the changing strategic focus, the means of assessing will also change. This assessment has astrong focus on measuring the achievement of set goals and targets. Although most of the FPS-NPstrategies for 1999/2000 were formulated in a way which does not easily allow for easy quantitativeassessment, a general judgement of direction of the development can be made. During the ongoingstrategic planning process, more precise goals will be formulated.

Short-term assessment (1 year)This refers to the annual planning cycle, which includes the Annual Work Plans and annual budgets.The main way is to re-structure the form and content of the Annual Work Plan to become morequantitative and easier to compile and compare. The presentation should also be based on target settingfor main, recurrent activities. Large activities, such as management planning of larger protected areas,are also budgeted and monitored as projects, including financial monitoring.

Assessment Domains and Indicators

The indicators will be selected from the following organizational domains:

I M P A C T

P E R S O N N E L

P R O C E S S E SR E S O U R C E SM i s s i o n

V i s i o n

S t r a t e g y

For each domain and for selected criteria within these domains a number of indicators have beenchosen which either provide a basis for time-series statistics or directly relate to specified standards orobjectives. The preliminary indicators are presented in Appendix 1.

Conclusions

The proposed system for assessing management effectiveness at the Forest and Park Service NatureProtection is neither comprehensive nor fully satisfactory. However, both the environment in whichconservation operates as well as the institutions and organizations are changing perpetually. Thus it isimportant not to try to solve all the issues and develop complete solutions, since this costs too muchand needs to be reviewed frequently. The lesson from this exercise was that issues need to be tackled ina step-by-step, iterative way. Nevertheless, FPS Nature Protection will start using a set of indicators toassess management effectiveness this year. The following issues will be addressed in greater detail:

1. Deciding on which of the proposed indicators should be compiled to form a set of long-term,time-series data. This may still require a review of existing information

2. Formulating a vision and strategic goals, which are measurable, including determining

indicators to assess the achievement of these goals in future strategic planning

3. Deciding on the structure and contents of the Annual Work Plan. The aim is to present theinformation as much as possible in quantitative, table format with clear annual goals. This willinclude choosing which of the proposed indicators can be incorporated in the new structure ofplans

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4. Deciding on the structure and contents of the Annual Report. The aim is to base it as much as

possible on the structure and contents of the work plan and the time-series statistics

5. Developing further standards and setting priorities for PA management, especially regardingbiological monitoring, management and restoration needs, requirements for managementinterventions to protect endangered and threatened species

6. In the long term a review and a closer look at the information systems and databases are

required in order to provide better linkages between these and planning, implementation andreporting.

A major obstacle for assessment is that staff time is not monitored against the majorprocesses and tasks, while at the same time personnel costs account for 2/3 of therecurrent expenditure. Thus it is extremely difficult to formulate indicators to assessreal efficiency and effectiveness of management. This has been discussed on severaloccasions but proposals have been rejected so far. However, a more comprehensivesystem to assess management effectiveness in the true sense will require a system toallocate staff time to the major processes and tasks. During the past years there hasbeen a steady shift towards a more project-oriented modus operandi partly influencedby the EU-Life programme. Budgeting and financial monitoring were also changed in1999 to reflect project-driven planning and implementation. A greater focus on thiswill immediately make it easier to assess management effectiveness.

Finally, the proposed system is far from complete. Nevertheless, it will be introducedthis year. This is based on the understanding that using a system will help to improvethings and that it is better to have something incomplete than to have nothing.

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Appendix 1.

DOMAIN CRITERIA INDICATORS

IMPACT External review International evaluationNational evaluation

Feed-back from goal setting Feedback from supervising ministriesCustomer satisfaction Feedback from surveys in information centres and PasCustomer service Customer contacts and annual change by service point

Cost of customer service by service pointLabour input in customer service by service pointNo. of visitors at web site by pageNo. of recorded feed-back in environment management system

Publicity Published articles in media selected for monitoringNo. of and stakeholders in projectsNo. of and participants in seminars, meetings etc. organized by NP

RESOURCES Development of funding Funds by source over time, and by Natural Heritage ServicesPercentage of personnel cost, fixed and recurrent cost, project funding, operationalcosts and investment, income and sponsor fundsDevelopment of funds, conservation area and number of sites over time in relation toa fixed starting year.Funds by labour input, and by customers

STAFF Number of staff No. of permanent and temporary staff by administrative unitArea managed by labour inputAverage and age distribution of permanent staffAverage employment length of permanent staffPercentage of women by staffing categories

Staff skills Staff distribution by trainingDays of training per person

Health Days of sick leaveNo. of accidents in workResources used for recreation

Motivation and atmosphere Feedback from corporate survey

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DOMAIN CRITERIA INDICATORS

PROCESS: DIRECTING USE OF PAsAcquiring PAs Area and annual change by PA-categories

Acquisition of new areasLand ownership related costsDemarcated PAs, area and proportion

Basic information GIS-coverageBiological surveys No. and cost of biodiversity surveys for management plansCultural surveys No. and cost of cultural surveys for management plansVisitor surveys Visitors, area and sites where annual visitor surveys are conducted, and in relation to

priority 1-4 areasResources used for visitor surveys

Management plans Coverage of management plans by PA-categories and proportion in relation torequirementResources used for management planningAge distribution of management plansNo. of stakeholders involved in management planning

Legal regulations and No. and area of PAs with approved regulationsenforcement Enforcement reports and no. of offences observedConcessions and agreements No. of and profit from PA concessions

PROCESS: MANAGEMENT AND RESTORATION OF SPECIES AND HABITATSBiological surveys No. and annual cost of species and habitat surveys

No. of endangered species under monitoring found in the surveysNo. and proportion of surveys required by Natura-2000

Habitat management andrestoration planning

No., area and coverage of management plans in relation to determined need

No., area and proportion of restoration plans in relation to determined needHabitat management andrestoration

Cost of management and restoration interventions and proportion of recurrent budget

No., area and proportion of sites where management interventions are madeNo., area and proportion of sites where restoration interventions are made

Monitoring managementinterventions

Cost of monitoring and proportion of recurrent budget

Reproduction result of Golden Eagle and Saimaa Ringed Seal

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DOMAIN CRITERIA INDICATORS

PROCESS: CUSTOMER SERVICE AND NATURE INTERPRETATIONNature exhibitions Age distribution of exhibitions in the information centres

No. and age distribution of presentation material in the information centresNo. of temporary exhibitions in the information centres

Publications and internet Availability of park leaflets in priority 1 and 2 parksAvailability of different categories of leafletsAnnual cost of producing publication materialNo. of visits on web-site and the annual cost

Visitor facilities Information on condition of visitor interpretation signboardsInformation on condition of other visitor facilities & infrastructure

PROCESS: INFLUENCING LAND USELegal establishment of PAs No. and area of legally established PAs, PAs proposed for legal establishment,

annual change and proportion of managed area

No. and area of PAs legally established by FPS, annual change and proportion ofmanaged area

Regional natural resource and areaecological planning

Labour input into regional natural resources and area ecological, and operationalplanningArea and % of special protection categories in area ecological plans

PROCESS: INTERNATIONAL AND CONSULTANCY ASSIGNMENTSEU co-operation No., funding and labour input in EU-Life projects

No., funding and labour input in EU-Rural Development projectsInternational projects No. and labour input in international projectsInternational co-operation inconservation

No. and labour input in co-operation with international conservation agencies

No. of visitor days to FPS

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Non-Governmental Organizations and Protected Area ManagementAgencies Working Together to Assess PA Effectiveness: Successes,Problems and Prospects – the Experience of WWF-Brazil

Rosa M. Lemos de Sá, Nurit Bensusan1 and Leandro Ferreira2

AbstractIn 1997, WWF-Brazil started a protected areas campaign to call public attention to so-called “paper parks”. The objective was to raise awareness, creating pressure on thegovernment to improve the condition of parks, thus increasing biodiversity conservation. Inorder to have accurate information on the status of protected areas, WWF invited theBrazilian Environmental Institute - IBAMA (the federal institution responsible for theadministration of protected areas), to join us in designing a methodology to evaluateprotected areas. A questionnaire containing eight questions on protected areaimplementation and five questions on external factors (vulnerability) was developed andfilled out jointly with 86 park directors. The methodology design and data gathering wereaccomplished by a common effort between both institutions. However, data analysis andinterpretation were done solely by WWF. The results showed that 75 per cent of allprotected areas were under some type of risk. The report released by WWF was widelypublicized in the media, and had strong repercussions within IBAMA.

Rosa Lemos de SáSenior Project OfficerWWF BrazilSHIS EQ QL 06/08Conjunto E - 2° andarBrasilia/D.F./71620-430BRAZILemail: ROSA@wwf.org.br

1Nurit Bensusan, WWF-Brazil2Leandro Ferreira, WWF-Brazil

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Non-Governmental Organizations and Protected Area ManagementAgencies Working Together to Assess PA Effectiveness: Successes,Problems and Prospects – the Experience of WWF-Brazil

Rosa M. Lemos de Sá, Nurit Bensusan and Leandro Ferreira

IntroductionPartnerships, as defined by the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation – NFWF, are anyvoluntary collaboration among organizations working toward a common objective. Ingeneral, partnerships are established to overcome problems that cannot be solved byone organization alone (Sidler, 1994). Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) inpartnership for conservation can contribute, among other things, with staff,membership support, communication through newsletters, and promotion of politicalinfluence in decision making (Rocha, 1997). They play a fundamental role inlobbying. Their strengths are often related to their:

§ Capacity to be innovative§ Clearer position and more independence from government§ Creativeness in solution of problems§ Flexibility to experiment with new solutions§ Pioneering action§ High commitment§ High credibility.

According to Lees (1995), nationally based NGOs can reach the wider publicthrough well-researched publicity campaigns on the need to supportprotected areas. Based on this principle, in 1997 WWF-Brazil started acampaign in favour of strict-use protected areas as part of its strategy toinfluence public policies. The objective was to call attention to the so-called“paper parks”, and to press the government to vote on, and pass a Bill whichcreates a National System of Protected Areas (Sistema Nacional de ÁreasProtegidas – SNUC). The bill had been in the House of Representatives since1991, but had never been voted on.

The “Protect our Parks” campaignIn order to make the campaign, WWF needed precise information on the situation ofprotected areas (PAs). Because this information was not available a methodology tomeasure the degree of implementation and vulnerability of the PA system wasdesigned, in collaboration with the Federal Institute for the Environment - IBAMA.The methodology needed to produce precise information, and at the same time beeasy to apply, low cost, and generate results in a short period of time.

The processThe first step was to carry out a one-day seminar to discuss criteria, form, and the typeof information available. This seminar included the presence of five members ofIBAMA, comprising: the head of the parks division, another staff person from thisdivision, two park managers, and one consultant who had worked for IBAMA’s parkdivision for over 20 years; one employee from the Department of the Environment

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from São Paulo state who had written a thesis on evaluation of PA in Costa Rica; andfour staff members of WWF-Brazil.

It was decided, at this meeting, that a questionnaire to be answered by park managerswas the best way to quickly access reliable information about PAs. The questions tobe asked were also defined during this meeting. They were based on two principles:firstly the relevance/importance of the question to assess implementation andvulnerability, and secondly on the availability of the information (i.e. if theinformation was extremely relevant for the research but the information was notavailable the question was dropped).

The methodologyThe final questionnaire had a total of 13 multiple choice questions. Eight questionswere designed to characterize the degree of implementation of the areas: 1) landtenure; 2) land post demarcation; 3) existence of management plan; 4) presence orabsence of illegal activities within the PA; 5) budget requested in relation to budgetreceived; 6) staff numbers; 7) existence of equipment, and 8) adequate infra-structure. The other five questions measured the degree of vulnerability: 1) degree ofinsularity; 2) percentage of altered areas within the PA; 3) illegal exploration ofresources within the PA; 4) land use in the buffer zone, and 5) presence ofdevelopment projects within the PA buffer zone.

The questionnaires were answered by the managers of the protected areas during theirannual meeting in 1998. To account for the time necessary to implement a protectedarea, only areas older than six years were analysed. Therefore, from a total of 91existing areas, 86 were assessed for this study.

The questionnaire resultsAfter we analysed the questionnaire, the results were presented in a second one-dayseminar to the same group who designed the questions. The data showed oppositeresults for implementation and vulnerability. While 54.6% of the areas were

20 PA under EXTREME

Risk

17 PA underHIGHRisk

22 PA underNORMAL

Risk

27 PA underMEDIUM

Risk

Risk Matrix

Implementation Degree0 4

Vu

lner

abili

ty S

tatu

s

4

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considered less than minimally implemented and only 8.1% reasonably implemented,56.9% of the areas were considered only slightly vulnerable and only 2.3%vulnerable. The group decided to plot implementation results against vulnerability,creating a risk matrix. According to the matrix, 75% of all protected areas were undersome type of risk.

Dissemination of resultsAt this point WWF started to work on its own to release the information to the media,launching the Parks Campaign. The WWF report entitled “Parks – Protected Areas orEndangered Spaces” (Parques – Áreas Protegidas ou Espaços Ameaçados) waslaunched in March 1999 at a press conference at the WWF office. WWF staff gaveseveral TV, newspaper, and radio interviews. Between March and October 1999, therewere 50 news releases in newspapers and magazines about WWF's report on Parks, aswell as several TV and radio interviews.

On April 15th WWF participated in a Public Audience at the National Congress todiscuss the National System of Protected Areas - SNUC. IBAMA’s Natural ResourceDepartment director was present as well as several politicians. Using WWF reportdata, we argued that the SNUC Bill had to be voted and approved by Congress inorder to improve park conditions (one important determining factor of the bill is thatfinancial resources collected by parks are reinvested in the protected area system; thisis not the case today).

WWF also launched an e-mail petition in favour of parks, asking people to pressCongress to vote on the SNUC Bill. A sample letter to Congressmen accompanied theWWF petition, and as a result Congressmen started to receive thousand of letters,jamming their computers.

On Environmental Day 1999 (5 June) WWF organized an event in front of theNational Congress. Hundreds of children stood on the Congress front lawn formingthe map of Brazil, while others stood inside the map representing each PA holding asign with the name of the PA and wearing a coloured T-shirt and cap, representing thedegree of risk that specific PA was under (black = extreme risk; red = high risk;yellow = medium risk; and green = normal risk). The children also read the petitionthat was sent by e-mail, and handed over 5,000 signatures to a group of Congressmen.

Campaign successTen days after the event in front of Congress the SNUC Bill was voted on andapproved in the House of Representatives. The Bill, however, still has to be voted inthe Senate. Therefore, the e-mail campaign continues.

WWF has also been recognized as the NGO behind the parks report, and has beenasked by other institutions and State Governments to help carry out similar studies forstate-level protected areas. WWF organized a seminar in September 1999 to explainthe methodology to staff members from the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, MinasGerais, Rondônia, and Mato Grosso, and they are carrying out their own studies.Fundacion Vida Silvestre Argentina – FVSA, has also applied WWF-Brazil’smethodology to protected areas in Argentina. The WWF network, as well as theIUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), have also drawn from WWF-

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Brazil work to develop new methodologies to assess PA effectiveness (Hockings,2000 and Hakizumwami, 2000).

Partnership problemsBecause the campaign had intense repercussions in the media, IBAMA officialsstarted contesting the validity of the data, arguing that park managers did not haveenough knowledge of park problems, and therefore the data was inaccurate. They feltthreatened by the report, and the only way out was to deny that the information wascorrect. Some IBAMA officials took the results as a personal judgement of theirperformance. How come the results were so bad, when they had worked so hard?What they did not understand was that data prior to this exercise did not exist, so itwas impossible to tell if PAs were better or worse before their mandate. The studywas meant to be a “snapshot” of the present situation, a baseline for futuremonitoring, and an instrument for government planning, not a judgement of past orpresent performances.

WWF-Brazil should have kept closer communication with IBAMA about thecampaign. They were informed only a couple of days before the press release, andthey were not ready for the repercussions. WWF should have been more sensitive topossible conflicts when we started the partnership with an organization which has acompletely different style. Norris and Camposbasso (1995) stated that “relationshipstend to work best in a “cards on the table” atmosphere, and that was the problem inthe partnership between IBAMA and WWF. IBAMA did not know that WWF wasgoing to launch a campaign in favour of PAs. There was a complete lack ofcommunication between the two organizations immediately prior to the release of theparks report.

Some of the most common problems identified in partnerships in general are (Rocha,1997):

§ Lack of formal agreement (specific legal tools for partnership and legalsupport)

§ No clear roles and responsibilities between partners§ Difficulties in communication between partners§ Lack of trust between partners§ Problems with the media§ Lack of better understanding of benefits

And more specifically in partnerships between an NGO and government:§ Different flexibility and rhythm between NGOs and government§ Government employees may fear NGOs participation due to loss of

power§ Discontinuity in actions and priorities by government, putting activities

and results at risk.

In this case, specifically, the lack of communication, and full disclosure of clearintentions were the cause of unnecessary grief.

Solution to the problem, prospectsIn order to solve the problem created, several meetings were held between staffmembers of both institutions. Presentations were made by WWF staff to IBAMApersonnel, and when giving interviews to the media, WWF staff always reaffirmed

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that the poor conditions found in most parks were a reflection of the lack ofgovernment commitment to the environment, and not a reflection on IBAMA’spersonnel. WWF also invited park managers to give joint interviews or indicated theirnames to reporters, so that all sides could be heard.

Today WWF and IBAMA have a formal five-year Cooperative Agreement signed byboth institution directors, and IBAMA has agreed to carry out the second park survey,jointly with WWF, in June 2000.

ConclusionsAny relationship between an NGO and government is complex, and NGOs “maycomplement, supplement, provide parallel services, or pressure the state to changetheir services” (Meyer, 1992). However, in every case “NGOs need to retain openinformation exchange with governments, keeping their official partners fully informedabout, and involved in, their activities.” (Less, 1995). Fortunately, partnerships are adynamic process involving conflict and negotiations, allowing partners to review theirposition and to adjust to new situations.

According to Rocha (1997), some basic conditions to establish a successfulpartnership are:

§ Making the process formal and creating a legal tool for partnerships§ Avoidance of personal issues, professionalism§ Exchange of information, knowledge, and help§ Roles, responsibilities and benefits clearly defined§ Mutual respect of roles, and timelines previously established§ Real interest and involvement of partners towards the partnership§ Common objectives§ Mutual trust§ Mutual benefits

A partnership is a time-consuming process, with many adjustments to be made.Relationships need to be polished and partners must be aware of this adaptive process.However, the value of this type of partnership to conservation efforts is unmistakable,and excellence must be pursued.

References

Hakizumwami, Elie. 2000. Protected Areas Management Effectiveness Assessmentfor Central Africa, A Development Report, Forest Innovations, IUCN and WWF,Gland, Switzerland.

Hockings, Marc; Sue Stolton, and Nigel Dudley. 2000. Evaluating Effectiveness: Aframework for Assessing Management of Protected Areas, Draft for discussion,IUCN.

Leandro V. Ferreira, Rosa M. Lemos de Sá, Robert Buschbacher, Garo Batmanian,Nurit R. Bensusan, Kátia Lemos Costa . 1999. Protected Areas or EndangeredSpaces? WWF Report on the Degree of Implementation and the Vulnerability ofBrazilian Federal Conservation Areas. 15pp

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Lees, Annette. 1995. Innovative Partners: The Value of Non-GovernmentOrganizations in Establishing and Managing Protected Areas. In ExpandingPartnerships in Conservation, ed. J. A. McNeely, Washington D.C.: Island Press

Meyer, C. 1992 . A Step Back as Donors Shift Institutional Building from the PublicSector to the “Private” Sector. World Development, 20 (8): 1115-1126.

Norris, R., and L. Camposbasso. 1995. Protected Areas and Private Sector: BuildingNGO relationships. In Establishing and Managing Protected Areas. In ExpandingPartnerships in Conservation, ed. J. A. McNeely, Washington D.C.: Island Press

Rocha, L. M. 1997. Protected Areas and Non-Governmental Organizations inPartnerships for Conservation: Case Studies from Brazil and Recommendations forthe Future. Master Thesis. University of Florida. 77 pp.

Sidler, J. L. 1994. Partnerships as Mechanisms for Change: the Benefits of, andBarriers to Collaboration. Washington D.C.: Research for Better Schools and Officeof Education Research and Improvement (ED).

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Evaluate, Change and Propagate – Three Steps to Better Parks

Fiona Leverington and Terry HarperAbstractEvaluation of park management performance is only useful if we use the answers to adapt and improveour planning and management. Three steps are needed: evaluating our present performance; changingour priorities and systems to improve performance; and supporting good ideas while ‘propagating’them to other parks.

Our system of park management performance evaluation is based on the work ofHockings (1997). Performance criteria have been identified for about 40 parkmanagement activities within four broad themes of protection, presentation,community relations and management capacity. Performance scores aredetermined for each management activity (e.g. control of pest plants) and can becalculated for each of the four themes or for all aspects of management.

Evaluation will show where management practices need to be changed. Priorities for resourceallocation, staff training and development of better systems will be based on ratings for individualmanagement activities and broader themes. Priorities can be set at the state-wide, district and parklevel.

Where evaluation reveals excellent performance in a particular area, ideas and approaches might be‘propagated’ throughout the system, allowing for the individual differences on each park (Uphoff et al.1998). Improvements in park management performance will thus be both ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’,encouraging genuine support and adaptive management by the field managers whose efforts make thereal difference in conserving park values.

Fiona LeveringtonPrincipal Conservation OfficerQueensland Parks and Wildlife Service28 Moonmera StreetThe GapQueensland 4061AUSTRALIAemail: fiona.leverington@env.qld.gov.au

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Evaluate, change and propagate – three steps to better parks

Fiona Leverington and Terry Harper

IntroductionThere is an old saying that if the horse kicks you once, the horse is a fool. If it kicks you twice, you arethe fool. Like all park management agencies, the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS) isreluctant to be kicked more than is necessary. We need to learn from experience - an obvious statementbut one which can be hard to translate into reality across a large agency with field operations in over300 protected areas.

Through the Parks Master Planning process currently underway in QPWS, we are examining practicesand principles from the past which we wish to keep and enhance, those which need changing, and theactions needed to achieve overall improvement of park management. Four main themes of managementhave been identified:

♦ protection of natural and cultural resources;♦ presentation, including the provision for recreational use and interpretation;♦ community involvement and relationships; and♦ management capacity.

Management capacity is the basis on which the other themes of management depend. This paperoutlines work being undertaken by the QPWS to improve its management capacity through developinga culture and systems which encourage learning and continual improvement in performance.

In its vision for management of its protected area system, the Queensland Parks and WildlifeService is committed to increasing its management capacity through:1. planning and managing the Parks system skilfully, effectively, adaptively and efficiently,

to maintain park values in conjunction with other private and state lands2. making good management decisions based on high standards of information and wisdom

and community involvement in decision making3. developing a dedicated, skilled and motivated workforce with clear policies, directions

and standards4. fostering continual improvement in park management through evaluation, learning, and

reliable and logical allocation of resources.

Creating the visionBefore the cycle of evaluation, change and propagation can begin, it is essential to understand what it iswe are trying to achieve in park management - to define our primary responsibilities. This is being doneon a state-wide basis through the Master Plan, which will outline the vision, guiding principles, desiredoutcomes and necessary actions for management. Planning at a finer level defines these in more detailfor individual parks and for more specific topic areas such as visitor management and cultural heritage.As shown in Figure 1, identifying the scope of management responsibilities and the level to which theyare met is the first step in a statewide evaluation of park management performance.

Figure 1: Steps in evaluation and links to resource allocation

Clearly identify management responsibilities within four managementthemes: resource protection, presentation, community involvement andmanagement capacity

Identify the characteristics and performance indicators of five levels ofservice delivery for these management responsibilities

Conduct broadscale evaluation of parkmanagement performance measured by

Conduct more detailedevaluation of

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What are our management responsibilities?As outlined above, four primary themes of management are identified in the Master Plan, and withineach of these broad areas are many functions and activities, each of which can occur at a range oflevels. For example, management of pest plants could be undertaken on a park at any level from zeroactivity to absolute control. Though in reality there is a continuum, five levels of possible servicedelivery have been identified, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Five levels of service delivery for protected area managementService Delivery Description1. Regressive Gradual reduction in the condition of the protected area system. Not meeting

statutory obligations or community expectations. Asset base deteriorating.2. Caretaker Maintaining the overall condition of the protected area system at existing

standards. Meet only most basic statutory obligations. Urgent threats attendedto, but few planned and consistent management programs undertaken.

3. Basic Meeting priority statutory obligations and basic community expectations formanagement, including implementation of the good neighbour policy andperiodic refurbishment of existing infrastructure, plant and equipment.

4. Enhanced Allows sound management of protected areas with some additionalinfrastructure to support natural resource and visitor management withincreased visitor and tourism opportunities.

5. Best practice Optimum park management consistent with national and international bestpractice standards.

Levels one and two on this table are clearly unacceptable for park management as the responsibilitiesfor conservation and presentation of natural and cultural values are not being met. Levels three to five

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correspond to basic, enhanced and best-practice park management, which are defined in the MasterPlan as:

• Basic business will comprise those aspects of the Parks system’s management which maintain theecological and cultural integrity and natural landscapes in the Parks system. Basic business willalso comprise provision of essential presentation opportunities;

• Enhanced business will comprise those aspects of Parks system management which enhance theminimum essential standards of basic business; and

• Best practice management or supplementary business will comprise those aspects of Parks systemmanagement which, while not essential to basic business, would significantly complement andpromote the objectives of basic business.

Details and indicators of management responsibilities are further discussed below in relation to theevaluation of park management performance.Evaluating park managementEvaluation of the effectiveness of park management can be used to:

• improve decision making and operations in the field• review general protected area policies and programs• provide feedback on management to interest groups• help account for management expenditure• justify the need for additional resources (Hockings 1997).

Hockings (1997) provides a useful framework for understanding the process of evaluating parkmanagement performance. Of particular interest is the separation of design, inputs, processes, outputs,and outcomes as discrete aspects of park management activity worthy of evaluation (see Table 2). Managementactivity

Planning -reserve design

Resourcing -staff -funds -equipment

Implementation -management systemsand processes

Outputs -services and facilities -results of managementactions

Impacts -effects ofmanagement inrelation toobjectives

Type ofevaluation

Design Input Process Output Outcome

Focus ofevaluation

Appropriateness Economy Efficiency Effectiveness Effectiveness Appropriateness

Table 2: Evaluation and the protected area management cycle (after Hockings 1997).

Evaluation of park management in Queensland is undertaken every day, as park managers at all levelsreview their work, try out new ideas and consider the results. A range of monitoring programs is underway and there is some reporting of both activities and outcomes. In some cases, such as fire monitoringand reporting, considerable effort is going into developing statewide systems which will ensureconsistency over both time and space. Evaluation is then used to make judgements about theappropriateness and effectiveness of management in relation to observed changes.

However, there is a recognized need for a more formal and regular process of monitoring andevaluation of park management. Given the diversity of units within the park system and the breadth ofactivities involved in park management, there is a need to identify salient aspects of park managementand monitor them at a level of detail that provides meaningful results for management. This process is

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likely to involve trade offs between completeness, accuracy, detail, ease of completion, and cost ofimplementation.

Evaluation of the outcomes of park management, in particular the protection of biodiversity andecological processes, is both desirable and important, but also the most difficult. Evaluation of inputsand processes, known as management effectiveness evaluation, is also important and can be conductedon a yearly basis across all parks in the system.

The Master Plan recommends evaluation should be undertaken at several levels:

1. Broadscale rapid assessment of park management performance (measuring inputs, processes andsome outputs)

2. Regular evaluation of conservation of natural and cultural values through natural integritystatements and cultural heritage statements, which will be reviewed every five years (measuringoutcomes and recognizing changing influences)

3. Regular collection of visitor information, including basic statistics, use trends, and satisfaction, ona planned statewide basis; with subsequent evaluation of visitor satisfaction and trends (measuringoutcomes)

4. Planned and coordinated monitoring of biodiversity indicators across regions, for example inresponse to fire, and resultant evaluation of both broadscale and specific park managementperformance (measuring outcomes)

5. Planned monitoring of specific sites (e.g. for visitor impacts), species (e.g. populations of rare andthreatened species), activities (e.g. the impacts of recreational fishing in selected parks), accordingto management plans

6. Evaluation of the implementation and effectiveness of management plans (measuring inputs,processes, outputs and outcomes).

All of the above activities are important and work will continue over the coming years to refinemonitoring and evaluation programs and to implement such programs more widely. All link into thecycle of management improvement by providing information which managers at all levels use to makedecisions.

Rapid assessment of park management performanceThe broadscale rapid assessment of park management performance (the first evaluation category listedabove) is regarded as a primary tool for management improvement and resource allocation at astatewide level. While it does not directly measure the extent to which conservation objectives arebeing achieved, it is a relatively simple process, which can be used to:

• rapidly assess how well Queensland’s parks are being managed against determined indicators ofperformance

• provide a snapshot of park management performance at any given point in time• provide a baseline against which future management performance can be compared• identify areas of excellence in park management• identify aspects of park management requiring additional attention.

The assessment process is based on the assumption that certain activities characterize good parkmanagement. For example, a park with an approved management plan will be managed better than apark without an approved management plan. Other examples are that well-managed parks would have: • identified the natural and cultural values of the park• research and monitoring programs in place to keep track of changes in these values• identified the processes threatening the park’s natural and cultural values• a program to restore degraded areas• programs to manage cultural heritage• programs to manage fire and pest plants and animals.

As our confidence and capacity to monitor management improves, we will be able to test theseassumptions by, for example, measuring the extent to which management plans actually improve themanagement of parks.

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Attention will be given to a range of specific activities that are widely accepted to be central to goodpark management. The four ‘key aspects’ of management identified for the Master Plan (protection,presentation, community relations and management capacity) have been used to broadly describe thevariety of activities involved in park management. Discussions with a range of QPWS staff havehighlighted a range of specific activities under each of these key aspects which could be used to assesscurrent park management performance. For the purpose of evaluating park management performance, primary indicative activities for fourmanagement themes are shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Critical aspects of park managementProtection of natural and cultural resourcesü natural and cultural resources inventoryü research and/or monitoring of natural and cultural resourcesü identification of processes threatening natural and cultural resourcesü active management of natural and cultural resourcesü management of fireü control of pest animalsü control of pest plantsü park boundary managementü management of threatened speciesü restoration of degraded natural systemsü sustainable resource harvestingü impact assessmentü pollution controlü compliance

Presentationü recreation opportunity inventoryü research and/or monitoring of visitor useü visitor impact monitoring and managementü provision of visitor infrastructureü asset management (visitor infrastructure)ü management of commercial tour operationsü interpretation/education

Community Relationsü communicating with key stakeholdersü neighbour relationsü involving indigenous people in managementü involving the broader community in managementü identifying the economic value of parksü managing ‘public utilities’ usesü resource/revenue generationü community extension servicesü management integration

Management Capacityü legislationü law enforcementü management planningü asset management (management infrastructure)ü asset management (plant and equipment)ü emergency response and incident controlü risk assessmentü staff development and trainingü management information, communication and support systemsü staffing levelsü budget

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While many of these functions are manifest at the park level, they require the support of statewidesystems e.g. legal and policy framework.

How should the assessment be conducted?Given the large number and diverse nature of protected areas in Queensland there is a need for anevaluation instrument that is quick to administer and is likely to elicit honest and consistent results.Questions have been developed to ascertain management performance against each aspect ofmanagement. Table 4 indicates some of the questions.

Table 4: Sample of park management performance evaluation questionsCritical aspect Performance indicator Response options

natural resourcesinventory

adequacy of information about naturalvalues to support day-to-day management

0. There is little or no information available on thenatural resources of the park1. Information on the natural resources of the park isnot sufficient for planning and decision making2. Information on the natural resources of the park issufficient for critical areas of planning and decisionmaking3. Information on the natural resources of the park issufficient for most areas of planning and decisionmaking

map showing flora distribution (eg. avegetation map) at a scale appropriate tomanagement needs

0. No1. Yes (for some flora)2. Yes (for most flora)3. Yes (for all flora)

management offire

status of fire management NA. A documented fire management program is notrequired (ie. fire is not physically possible on this park)0. There is no documented fire management program1. A documented fire management program is currentlybeing developed2. A documented fire management program has beendeveloped but not implemented3. A documented fire management program has beendeveloped and is being partially implemented4. A documented fire management program has beendeveloped and is being substantially implemented

Advantages of this instrument are:• Management of each park is evaluated according to the level of input and activity appropriate to

that park, not against hard criteria which would compare each park against a fixed standard.• The assessment process is quick to administer (less than one hour per park to complete), capable of

being replicated across the State and, over time, simple to administer without the need for detailedtraining, and makes intuitive sense to QPWS staff, others in government, and the community.

• The assessment framework links with the managing for outcomes approach to planning, budgetingand performance adopted by the Queensland Government. The system will provide staff at alllevels of the organization with a clearer understanding of desired park management performancestandards and how they contribute to the achievement of these standards.

The assessment will not be used as punitive information against an individual's performance. Theassessment is of the Service’s management of the area, not the performance of an individual. Officerscompleting the assessment should be able to do so without 'fear or favour', otherwise assessment maybe overly biased. It should also be clear that evaluation should not be used to remove resources fromparks seen to be achieving a higher standard than other areas. The assessment is undertaken by park staff with the support of district or in some cases regional orcentral office staff, providing an opportunity for discussion and reflection.

The project also involves a risk assessment (see Table 5) based on some critical elements of parkmanagement similar to those identified earlier. The risk assessment attempts to document the likelihood

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of things getting worse, getting better or staying about the same assuming that management inputs andapproaches continue at current levels. This allows management to receive early warning on potentialmanagement challenges.

Table 5: Risk Assessment of Park Management (an example of questions)For the following elements of park management, what is the likely outcome in five years ifthere is no change in the current management approach (including resources, policy approachetc).

Critical aspects of park management muc

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muc

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orse

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Comments

management’s understanding of naturalvaluesmanagement’s understanding of culturalvaluesstatus of threatened speciesmanagement of firecontrol of weedscontrol of feral animalsunderstanding of the levels and patterns ofvisitor usedelivery of interpretation programscondition of walking tracksemergency response plansrisk assessment processesvisitor impact monitoring programsrelationship with key stakeholders

Changing practices: from evaluation to improvementA learning cultureUnderlying the concepts of evaluation and change is the need for an organizational culture committedto learning and continual improvement. While this principle is easy to state, it requires that members ofthe workforce at all levels, frompark rangers to seniormanagement, are prepared to:♦ be flexible and open to

change where necessary;♦ accept critical evaluation by

both staff and the public;♦ make and learn from

mistakes, and accept otherpeople making mistakes;

♦ accept that people from allparts of the organization andfrom outside have good ideasto contribute and that themanagement process shouldbe participatory wherever possible.

To be successful in the longer term, management improvements must be developed both from the topdown and the bottom up: that is, they must have the support of senior management, and also be seen asdesirable and logical by the workforce responsible for implementing them. Changes must be seen to be

The typical industrial-era reaction to any situation is to seek aquick fix, whether economic or technical. The spiral ofchange…argues for a slower process. It recognizes that one of ourprimary problems is that we try to solve problems rather thancreate opportunities…It also recognizes that there is no end topositive change: it is never complete…

Remember there is no single master step which makes everythingelse happen… Change happens when a lot of people do a lot ofthings differently.

Robert Theobald (1997) ‘Reworking success. New communities atthe new millennium’, p.71.

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compatible with shared values and culture of the workforce and the community partners in parkmanagement. Where possible, good practices from the past should be built on and adapted rather thanbeing totally replaced, but where systems are clearly inadequate for the 21st century, the organizationmust be courageous in making necessary changes.

For example, thirty years ago much good park management was carried out by rangers with strongpractical bush skills and sometimes excellent natural history knowledge, but little formal training.Management practices such as controlling fires or building tracks were passed on by word of mouthfrom one ranger to the next and were often based on instinct and experience. Modern managementshould build on this expertise and not discount the value of this field experience. However, there is nowan expectation that such practices should also be documented and able to withstand communityscrutiny, that there will be consistency in management, and that regular monitoring and evaluation ofthe effectiveness of these practices will be undertaken. This can be facilitated by supporting rangerswhere necessary with scientific assistance, information and procedures, so that existing wisdom isretained and incorporated into a higher level of documented professionalism.

Using evaluation for changeResults of the rapid assessment will be provided for individual parks, or collections of parks at themanagement unit, district, regional or state level. Summary scores could also be provided for specificaspects of management or rolled up under each of the four ‘key aspects’ of protected area management.(see Appendix 1 for sample assessment results)

The results can then be used to stimulate changes, identify good practices and make managementdecisions at any level, as shown in Figure 2. This paper does not address the applications toperformance reporting and budget allocation, but considers how we can use evaluation to stimulatepositive changes and identify and propagate good practices.

Management unit

RapidAssessment

System

Individual

State

PerformanceReporting

District

Region

Budget andResourceAllocation

Planning

Identifychangesneeded

Identifygoodpractices

Propagategoodpractices

Implementchanges

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Figure 2: Levels of application for evaluation

It is recommended that the completion of the rapid assessment is a group learning exercise, for groupsof staff at park and district level to discuss and reflect upon their current activities and practices and tosee where they can be improved. Community involvement in this process can also be considered.Questions to be asked in a reflective environment would include:♦ Are these really measures of good practice? If we disagree, why and what would be a better

measure?♦ If we are scoring high on a particular indicator, what have we done to achieve this? Is this

consistent across the district? Are there any systems or practices we could share across the districtor at a wider level to help others in the workforce in this aspect of their work?

♦ If we are scoring low on a particular aspect, why has this occurred? What would be needed toachieve a higher score? Are there innovative ways that this could be achieved with limitedresources?

♦ How do the overall scores for parks across the district vary? What do these patterns indicate? Whatwould be needed across the district to improve management?

At regional and state level, the same questions can be asked, with a concentration on the wider patterns.

It is common practice to first blame any failings on a lack of resources, either of staff time or funds.This evaluation process can enable a more focussed consideration of where resources are a limitingfactor, and where extra resources could only be effectively used if there were also improvements insystems, support or motivation.

Propagating good ideas and practicesThe evaluation process will also identify, at all levels, examples of good ideas and practices. At a locallevel, working groups might discuss aspects of management which are being done very well on a parkor across a district. At regional or state level, it will be interesting to identify examples of where parksscore very highly in spite of being provided with no extra resources, and to further investigate why thisis happening.

How do we then translate ideas and isolated innovations into reality across a large, geographicallydispersed parks system?

Improving management systemsand practices in Queensland’sparks is a complex process. Thereare 122 operational centres spreadover a large area. Communicatingnew ideas and practices aroundthe state is a challenge, and in thepast many excellent ideas havebeen applied only in one park or asmall group of parks within a district.

Systems and practices which work well in one area may not work in others. Conditions in parks varyenormously, from small, near-urban parks with intense pressures from high visitor use and surroundingland-uses, to large remote parks with great logistical challenges in their management.

Recommended approaches include:

♦ encouraging ‘propagation’ of ideas, implying that they are adapted and tailored for individualcircumstances, rather than attempting to replicate identical approaches on all parks (Uphoff et al.1998)

♦ starting slowly and allowing ideas to be tried out and operational on some parks beforeimplementing them state-wide

♦ using the management planning process to introduce new approaches with community support

For sustainable development, capacities and orientation that arecreated must remain flexible, open to new information, ideas andinstructions….For innovations to remain relevant and effective,they must be continually checked against new realities andrevised accordingly. This makes ‘learning’ a goal with long-termimplications as well as a means for accomplishing short-termobjectives’Uphoff et al. (1998) “Reasons for success’

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♦ encouraging and facilitating direct communication between practitioners at whatever level the ideawill be implemented. For example, on-park techniques should be communicated directly amongranger staff through on-park meetings and practical workshops

♦ using district and regional staff to identify and communicate good practices within their areas andto staff from other areas

♦ involving staff from all levels in preparation of Master Plans and statewide strategies.

ConclusionIn conjunction with community partners, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service istaking seriously the need to adopt an open, learning culture and to encourage continualimprovement in its operations. The genuine support of staff, both in the field and incentral office, are essential, especially in making evaluation of park managementperformance a real, rather than paper, exercise, and in using the results of thisevaluation to effect real management improvements.

ReferencesHockings M, (1997). Evaluating management effectiveness - a framework for evaluating managementof protected areas, IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, Working Group on ManagementEffectiveness.

Theobald R, (1997) Reworking success - new communities at the millennium, Gabriola Island, BCCanada, New Society

Uphoff N, M. Esman and A. Krishna. (1998). Reasons for success: learning from instructiveexperiences in rural development. West Hartford, Conn, Kumarian Press.

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Appendix 1: Sample results of park management performance evaluationManagement Score Card for XYZ National Park (1999)

Aspect of management Performance rating

Protection E D C B A

identification of the park’s natural resources Xidentification of the park’s cultural resources Xresearch and monitoring of natural values

research and monitoring of cultural values Xidentification of processes threatening natural values Xidentification of processes threatening cultural values X

restoration of degraded natural systems Xcultural heritage management Xnatural heritage management

management of fire Xcontrol of introduced animals (including stock) Xcontrol of introduced plants X

park boundary management Xmanagement of threatened species X

(overall rating for protection) X

Presentation

identification of recreation opportunities available on the park Xresearch and monitoring of visitor use Xstandard and style of public access Xmanagement of commercial tour operations X

visitor impact monitoring and management Xasset management of visitor infrastructure Xprovision of visitor infrastructure X

interpretation X

(overall rating for presentation) X

Community Relations

contacting key stakeholders Xneighbour relations X

involving indigenous people in management Xinvolving the community in management Xidentifying the economic value of parks X

managing ‘public utilities’ uses Xrevenue generation and business development Xlevel of support for the park in the local community X

community extension services X

(overall rating for community relations) X

Management Capacity

management planning Xasset management of management infrastructure X

asset management of management plant and equipment Xemergency response and incident control Xrisk assessment X

staffing levels Xbudget Xstaff development and training X

management information support systems Xmanagement bases Xlaw enforcement X

(overall rating for management capacity) X

(overall rating for management) X

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Management Performance (Smith National Park performance over time)

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Protection

Presentation

Community Relations

Management Capacity

Overall Management

Percentage of maximum possible score

2000

2001

2002

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Park Effectiveness in The Tropics

Aaron Bruner, Ted Gullison*, Richard Rice* and Gustavo Fonseca*

AbstractOver the past two decades, many observers have claimed that where there is stronghuman pressure, protection through parks is not possible. The purpose of this projectis to address this claim using data directly from on-the-ground practitioners inthreatened parks. We gathered data on threats, impacts, local conditions andmanagement activities from 93 protected areas from 23 countries. Analyses show thatthese parks are very successful at stopping land clearing, and are also effective atmitigating other threats such as logging and fire. Our central finding is therefore thatparks can and do successfully address major threats. At the same time, there is a clearneed to improve effectiveness in some areas, perhaps especially against illegalhunting. In the parks we studied, park effectiveness correlates with basic managementactivities such as enforcement, boundary demarcation, and direct compensation tolocal communities, suggesting that even modest increases in support and fundingwould directly increase the ability of parks to protect biodiversity.

Aaron BrunerCoordinator, Centre for Applied Biodiversity ScienceConservation International2501 M St. NW, suite 200Washington D.C. 20037USAemail: a.bruner@conservation.org

*Ted Gullison, Richard Rice and Gustavo FonsecaCenter for Applied Biodiversity ScienceConservation International

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Park Effectiveness in The Tropics

Aaron Bruner, Ted Gullison*, Richard Rice* and Gustavo Fonseca*

INTRODUCTION

This document presents the central findings of an assessment carried out over the pastyear, concerning how effectively parks have been protecting biodiversity in thetropics1. The project attempts to provide the conservation community, donors, andpolicy makers with concrete data to support fact-based decisions about the role ofparks in conservation strategies, as well as about management activities. It does thisby bringing together and analysing detailed information directly from people workingin parks across the tropics.

The study focuses on protected areas in IUCN categories I and II that are over 5,000hectares in size, and more than five years old. It also focuses exclusively on parks inareas of significant human activity, so nearly all the parks described here are facingserious challenges. Data come from responses to a questionnaire, and cover threatsand impacts from six potential sources of damage (land clearing, mining2, logging,hunting, grazing, and fire), local conditions (such as human settlements in parks andease of access), and management activities (such as number of park staff andcommunity involvement in park management). Ultimately, we analysed 93 parksfrom 23 countries, cumulatively covering 18 million hectares.

Findings: Local Conditions and Management

The parks ranged widely in factors such as size, primary ecosystem type, budget,management strategy, and level of threat from different sources. However, nearly allfaced serious pressure due to the presence of human communities, ease of access, andsignificant human activity in their immediate surroundings. 73 per cent had peopleliving inside their boundaries and in 54 per cent, residents contested the ownership ofsome percentage of the land area. In two-thirds of the parks, major roads or riversreached or crossed the park border. The majority of the parks also had high levels ofhunting, logging, grazing, land clearing and burning in their immediate surroundings.

The parks also faced serious challenges in the form of inadequate support formanagement. Median annual funding was US $1.18 per hectare, significantly lessthan most proposed financial targets for effective management 3. Respondents alsojudged that staff lacked much of the critical training and equipment. Table 1summarizes the findings on management activities.

1 This project would not have been possible without the many individuals who contributed information,those who coordinated data gathering for their countries, and the Conservation International staff whocoordinated the project in the field. We sincerely thank these people for their time and energy. Wewould also like to thank P. Benson, T. Brooks, C. Gascon, J. Hardner, D. Repasky, and A. Rylands forvaluable comments and discussions.2 Mining data were generally insufficient or missing and were excluded from any analysis.3 A. N. James, M.J.B. Green, J.R. Paine, Global Review of Protected Area Budgets and Staff (WCMC,Cambridge, UK, 1999)

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FINDINGS: EFFECTIVENESS

We assessed effectiveness from four perspectives. The first three are based on levelsof impact. These are: land clearing in the parks since establishment, current conditionof the parks in comparison to the condition of their surroundings, and spatialdistribution of impacts within the parks. The fourth analysis attempts to identify themanagement activities and local conditions associated with effective protection.

Land clearing since establishment: Perhaps the most fundamental finding of theanalyses was that 83% of the parks experienced no clearing since they wereestablished. Furthermore, a full 40% of the parks permitted the regeneration ofnative vegetation on land that was cleared at the time of park establishment.Only 17% of the parks lost native vegetation due to land clearing. On balance,the parks reclaimed more land than was lost due to clearing. These areachievements are impressive given that the average age of the parks was 21years.

Condition of parks in comparison to their surroundings: Large-scale impacts inthe areas surrounding most of the parks suggest that they were underconsiderable pressure. Despite this pressure, the parks addressed these threatsto a significant degree: for all impacts tested, the parks were in significantlybetter condition than their surrounding areas (at the p<0.000 level). However,they mitigated each impact at a different level. In combating hunting especially,the findings suggest that many parks are suffering significant problems. Fordetails, see Table 2.

Spatial distribution of impacts: Data on where impacts occurred within parks suggestthat some impacts decline as distance from the park borders increases, and some donot. Land clearing and grazing declined significantly, with impacts reaching zero atan average of 8km and 5km from the border, respectively. For burning, the decreasein impact with distance was minimal, while there was no significant decline inlogging and hunting.

Factors correlated with effective protection: The most effective parks werecharacterized by:

• more guards per hectare; strikingly, the 15most effective parks had approximately 8 times more guards per hectare thanthe 15 least effective

• a higher rate of apprehension of offendersafter evidence of a violation was detected

• more significant penalties• more border demarcation• the existence of direct compensation

Programmes to local communities for lost access to resources or damage bywildlife

CONCLUSIONS

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The findings of this study lead to three basic conclusions. 1) Parks have beensignificantly effective at protecting biodiversity, in a context of serious challenges andthreats. They have been especially effective in preventing land clearing, arguably themost fundamental threat to biodiversity. 2) At the same time, there is a clear need toincrease support for parks to improve effectiveness against all threats, perhapsespecially against hunting. 3) Parks should remain a central component ofconservation strategies. Creating large, new parks where possible, and strengtheningmanagement in existing parks, where necessary, will both contribute significantly tolong-term biodiversity conservation.

Table 1: Park Management Activities and Strategies in 93 Tropical ParksPercentage with a management plan 72%Median level of implementation of those with a plan little

Percentage with internal zoning 45%Percentage with a buffer zone 47%

Median budget per 100 square km insufficient dataMedian contribution of tourism to park budget 0-20%

Median number of people working at the park per 100 square km 4.0Median guards per 100 square km 2.1Median level of equipment littleMedian level of training little

Percentage of parks legally permitting some land clearing 38%Percentage of parks legally permitting some logging 39%Percentage of parks legally permitting some hunting 33%Percentage of parks legally permitting some grazing 33%

Median level of local involvement in management somePercentage offering compensation to communities for lost access to resources 24%

Median number of scientists on park staff 1

Table 2: Condition of Parks in Comparison to Their SurroundingsImpacts Median level of

impact in the parksMedian impact inthe immediatesurroundings (10kmradius)

Percentage of the parksin better condition thantheir surroundings

Land cleared (%) 0-10% 41-60% 97%Status of commercialtree species

slightly reduced frompristine levels

greatly reducedfrom pristine levels

85%

Status of gamepopulations

slightly reduced frompristine levels

greatly reducedfrom pristine levels

62%

Grazing pressure light medium 60%

Area burned in the lastfive years (%)

0-10% 11-30% 81%

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Implementation of a Framework to Monitor the Management of Protected Areasin Central America

José Courrau

AbstractThe conceptual base and the basic components of a monitoring framework developedby The Nature Conservancy (TNC) under the PROARCA/CAPAS project ispresented. This framework is currently being applied in protected areas of Panama,Costa Rica, Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. The support provided bythe TNC to protected area staff and national protected areas directors are explained.Data of the Central Volcanic Mountain Range's protected area is presented toillustrate the type of information collected and potential uses. Furthermore, details ofan advanced version of the monitoring framework already developed as well as anational level framework based on the site level method are presented. Projections forimplementation of these two new monitoring tools are also explained.

José CourrauProject DirectorThe Nature ConservancyP.O. Box 230-1225Plaza MayorSan JoséCOSTA RICAemail: jcourrau@sol.racsa.co.crwebsite: www.capas.org?

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Implementation of a Framework to Monitor the Management of Protected Areasin Central America

José Courrau

IntroductionThe need for measuring and documenting protected area management in CentralAmerica led to the initiative of developing a monitoring framework for protected areamanagement. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) developed the monitoring frameworkfor protected area management as a benchmark of the PROARCA/CAPAS project.

PROARCA/CAPAS is a partnership of the Central American Commission onEnvironment and Development (CCAD), the U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment (USAID), the International Resources Group, Ltd (IRG) and TNC. Theobjective of PROARCA/CAPAS is to provide political, technical, and economicsupport for the management of protected areas in Central America. In that regard,PROARCA/CAPAS is working towards regional coordination of biodiversityconservation, which supports the development of the Mesoamerican EcologicalCorridor.

Before the introduction of the PROARCA/CAPAS monitoring framework, the CentralAmerican protected areas systems did not have systematic programs to monitormanagement. The information needed for the establishment of monitoringframeworks has been fragmented, outdated, lacking scientific rigour or is simply non-existent. In addition, there is an evident lack of both an institutional culture concernedabout monitoring and trained staff to carry it out. A reduced budget is also anotherlimitation to monitoring.

The IV World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas that took place atCaracas, Venezuela in 1992 recommended the following:

• The protected areas monitoring programs are an important element in theenvironmental management of a region.

• Coordinated and comprehensive research and monitoring programs areessential and urgently required.

Every activity that takes place in a protected area has to be monitored in order toprevent negative impacts and to maximize positive impacts. Protected areas managersoften opt to use intuition and experience as the main support to make decisions.However, administrative actions based solely on intuition and experience tend to lackprecision, consistency, public support and traceability.

Conceptual BackgroundThe following planning models influenced the structure of the method designed forthe monitoring framework:

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a. Strategic planningStrategic planning is defined in this regard as: "the process by which theguiding members of an organization envision its future and develop thenecessary procedures and operations to achieve that future." (Goldstein, L. etal. 1993). The structure of the framework establishes that the first step of theprocess is to define an optimum scenario where the protected area wants todirect its efforts and investment. The protected area staff defines theprocedures they will have to follow to reach the optimum scenario in astructured manner, following the five levels of the indicators they decide tomonitor.

b. Transactive planningThe Theory of Transactive Planning was described by Friedmann (1973). It has as itscentrepiece the concepts of societal guidance (Mannheim, 1950; Etzioni, 1968; Etzioni,1993), societal learning and transactive communication. Mutual learning and dialogueamong experts, individuals living in the area planned for, and direct involvement ofcommunity andregional groups are encouraged.

c. A shared vision and collaborationA shared vision, in combination with collaboration and dispute management serve as thekey method for reaching decisions. As Gray (1989) argues, this allows independentgroups and individuals to work in a decision-making environment that is less competitive,is information based, involves values exploring and clarification, seeks commitment fromall parties to implement agreed change, and often results in the development of new andlasting institutional relationships.

Structure of the FrameworkThe process followed to develop the framework was participatory. The projecttechnical staff developed a framework proposal. This proposal was submitted for peerreview in a regional workshop. During this workshop, experts from the seven CentralAmerican countries reviewed, discussed and significantly improved the framework.The workshop participants developed a series of guidelines for the structure of theframework. These guidelines were: simplicity, low cost, to generate data in the shortterm and to promote excellence in protected area management.

The framework structure consists of the following: optimum scenario the protectedarea wants to achieve, scopes, factors that characterize each scope, criteria of eachfactor and the indicators of each criterion. The relationship among these componentsis as follows:

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OPTIMUM SCENARIO

Scopes ofanalysis

Factors

Criteria

Indicators Measurement

Comparisonand analysis

Figure 1

Indicators represent the main component of the structure and are the base that providesystematic structure to the monitoring method. Each indicator is described in aninterval scale of qualifications from one to five. Interval scales are used when themeasurement conveys information about the order of magnitude and the distancebetween values. These scales have a mathematical property of magnitude and identitybut do not have a true zero (Graziano and Raulin, 1996). Value one represents theminimum condition and value five the optimum condition that a protected area has ina given topic. The optimum condition must be represented in the optimum scenariofor that indicator.

The foundation for the framework was taken from “The Scorecards: Protected AreaConsolidation Criteria” method developed by TNC-Parks in Peril Program.

The main characteristics of this framework are defined by:

a. SimplicityIt is very easy to use. It does not require special technology or training. Theaverage protected area staff can apply it.

b. Low costThe method does not require a large investment in equipment or time, whichmakes it very attractive to Central American protected areas because of theobvious logistic and economic limitations.

c. With capacity to improvePresents the proper form to improve and evolve. New criteria and indicatorscan be developed to refine the existing ones and to cover gaps.

d. ApplicabilityEven though the Central American protected areas present obvious differencesin ecosystems, management style and level of development, the methodpresented is applicable. The wide coverage of different protected area topicsin the indicators allows the protected area staff to select those they considerapplicable based on management category, ecosystems, and others. Theframework’s flexibility makes it applicable.

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e. Promotes the excellence in protected areas conservationThe application of this method through time (e.g. monthly, quarterly,biannually or annually), shows how protected area management could beimproved over time. At the same time, it allows the people to see anddocument the management decisions. The information contained in thisinstitutional memory can be utilised to keep the decision-makers informed athigher levels. The construction of an institutional memory of the protectedarea is highly valuable for future management.

Implementation of the FrameworkThere are a number of implementation steps. A fundamental requirement forimplementation is open participation - the participation of interest groups related tothe protected area as well as the staff.

The first step is the development of an optimum scenario for the protected area. Thisscenario represents the goals the protected area wants to accomplish in a determinedperiod of time (e.g. five years). The staff considering the different indicators thatapply to the protected area should develop the scenario.

The following step is to conduct monitoring sessions every six months. In thesesessions the protected area staff and representatives from interest groups(communities, associations, tourism chambers, etc.), get together to review andqualify the status of the indicators based on the current situation of the protected area.Each indicator is presented to the group and discussed. Based on the discussion andthe submission of reliable evidence in the form of reports, maps, letters, and others,the group assigns to the indicator an agreed score (interval scale from one to five).

The results from the first monitoring session become the baseline data for monitoringand is compared against the optimum scenario. Every six months the results arecompared against the scenario and the previous measurements in order to measureprogress. Since the framework’s focus is the protected area, comparisons should bemade of the same protected area against itself across time. Comparisons between andamong protected areas are discouraged since the factors that influence themanagement are considered to be different. There is a high number of confoundingvariables influencing the management of each protected area.

Presently, the framework has been officially adopted and utilized by Parks agenciesand NGOs in a number of Central American countries (Table 1).

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Table 1

Country Collaborator Protected Area CoveredBelize Belize Audubon Society Cockscomb Wildlife Sanctuary

Crooked Tree Wildlife SanctuaryCosta Rica Sistema Nacional de Areas de

Conservación (SINAC)All

El Salvador Parques Nacionales y VidaSilvestre (PANAVIS)

Montecristo National ParkEl Imposible National Parks

Guatemala Consejo Nacional de AreasProtegidas (CONAP)

Sierra del Lacandón National Park,Biotopo del Quetzal,Laguna de Lachuá National Park,Cerro San Gil Rivers Protection Reserve

Nicaragua Ministerio de Ambiente y RecursosNaturales (MARENA)

Masaya National Park,La Flor Wildlife Refuge,Isla Juan Venado Natural Reserve,Volcán Mombacho Natural Reserve andEscalante-Chacocente Wildlife Refuge.

Panama Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente(ANAM)

All

Results for five indicators from three monitoring sessions in the Poás VolcanoNational Park are presented in Figure 2. This demonstrates the way data from thesessions can be used to track protected area management over time (figure 2). In thisexample, it is possible to notice that for three consecutive years Poás has not investedefforts in identifying and documenting its indicator species. Perhaps this is amanagement decision or perhaps it is lack of resources. In order to complement theresults is necessary to look at the field reports to understand what is happening. Onecan see that the park has gained new staff since 1999 as the indicator level went fromthree to four. The park has also improved in public participation in decision making.

Figure 2

The response from protected areas where the monitoring framework is beingimplemented is extremely positive. Especially positive are the reactions fromprotected area managers who perceive the framework as a useful tool for planning andmonitoring.

Results of 5 indicators from 3 monitoring sessions using PROARCA/CAPAS method in Poás Volcano National Park,

Costa Rica

Public Participation

Required Staff

Management Plan

Limits Demarcation

Indicator Species

Ind

ica

tor

na

me

Indicator Interval (1-5)

1999

1998

1997

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The optimum scenario, the baseline, data from the different monitoring sessions, theevidence that supports the indicator scores and the participation of staff and interestgroups become valuable resources that inform the protected area managers. It reducesuncertainty in management and supports the development of a common vision for thefuture. These form the basis of the institutional memory of the PA.

Future ImplementationThe monitoring framework has become popular among protected area managers inCentral America. The PROARCA/CAPAS project has received constant requests fornew training and refreshment sessions for protected area staff, especially in countriesand areas where a significant number of new staff have come aboard. Regular trainingsessions have been conducted in the past three years at regional and national levels. Itis expected that in the short term new protected areas in the Central Americancountries will adopt the monitoring method.

PROARCA/CAPAS is committed to provide training and updates of the monitoringmethod. Therefore, a new advanced version has been described. In this advancedversion, indicators present more structured levels of management and require moreuse of science and information by the protected area. This version is going to betested during the spring of 2000 in three different protected areas.

In addition, a monitoring framework for national protected area systems has beendeveloped. The main goal of the national version is to monitor the management andstatus of the complete protected area system of a country. This version is in a friendlysoftware format. The software is a database that incorporates the data from the sitelevel and outputs a set of reports and graphs. These reports and graphs are going tosupport the decision-making process of a national protected area director. Thenational version is being tested by the protected area agencies of Costa Rica andPanama. It is expected that more countries will incorporate it into their regularoperations.

ReferencesEtzioni, A. (1993). The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and theCommunitarian Agenda.

Etzioni, A. 1968. The Active Society. New York: The Free Press.

Friedmann, J. (1973). Retracking America: A Theory of Transactive Planning.Garden City, New York, USA: Anchor/Doubleday

Goldstein, L., T. Nolan, J.M. Pfeiffer. (1993) Applied Strategic Planning: AComprehensive Guide. USA: McGraw-Hill Inc.

Gray, B. (1989). Collaborating. San Francisco, USA: Jossey-Bass.

Graziano, A. and M.L. Raulin. (1996). Research Methods: A Process of Inquiry.New York, USA: Harper Collins Publishers.

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Mannheim, Karl (1950). Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning. New York:Oxford University Press.

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Management Effectiveness of the Dja Reserve, Cameroon

Elie Hakizumwami

AbstractThe Congo Basin4 contains the second largest continuous moist tropical forest in theworld covering about 2.8 million km2. These forests are known to be rich in naturalresources (fertile soils, a wide variety of wildlife species, tree species suitable fortimber, non-wood forest products, water bodies, mines, oil, etc.), attractive to differentusers who include logging and mining companies and local communities. Currently,about six per cent of these forests, including Dja Faunal Reserve, are declared as‘protected areas’. This paper will discuss the experience with regard to field testingthe system to assess the management effectiveness of protected areas in the CongoBasin, developed in the context of the WWF/IUCN/GTZ Forest Innovations Project5.The case of Dja Reserve in Cameroon will be presented, and the following issues willbe discussed:

• The context of Protected Areas in the Congo Basin

• Methodology adopted

• Summary of the results

• Lessons learnt from the use of the methodology.

Presented by Sue Stolton

Elie Hakizumwamic/o IUCN Regional Office for Central AfricaBP 5506YaoundéCAMEROONemail: elie.hakiza@camnet.cm

4 In the context of this case study, the Congo Basin covers six countries: Cameroon, CentralAfrican Republic, Congo Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon.

5 The project was conducted jointly with Nigel Dudley and Sue Stolton from EquilibriumConsultants

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Management Effectiveness of the Dja Reserve, Cameroon

Elie Hakizumwami

Introduction: The Forest Innovations ProjectAlthough gross damage to protected areas is usually obvious, by the time it is evident,it is often too late to do much about it. Identifying the most threatened areas before theproblem becomes well established – and the areas in which further funding orintervention could make a real difference – is therefore a very worthwhile, if complex,exercise.

This case study describes the development, testing and refinement of a methodologyfor assessing the management effectiveness of protected areas in the Congo Basincarried out under the auspices of the WWF/IUCN/GTZ Forest Innovations Project. Itfocuses on testing done at the Dja Reserve, Cameroon.

The methodology used in the region was based on the draft framework developed byWCPA (Hockings, 1997. It draws heavily on previous experience from WWF CentralAmerica/CATIE (see case study 2), WWF Brazil, and other systems that werepresented at a Forest Innovations workshop in Costa Rica in 1999 (Dudley andStolton, 2000). The methodology described emphasizes social aspects and theparticipation of a wide range of stakeholders. It was developed with contributionsfrom staff of IUCN and WWF. Field-testing was carried out in the Dja Reserve,Cameroon and the Minkebé Reserve, Gabon, two areas that were selected during aworkshop in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in March 1998.

The project is ongoing, and comments received from the report on the field-testing(Hakizumwami, 2000) which are summarized in this case study, will be incorporatedinto a revised methodology. An assessment of the methodology’s usefulness will thenbe carried out with conservation staff in the protected areas concerned.

The Forests of the Congo BasinThe Congo Basin contains the second largest continuous moist tropical forest in theworld, covering about 2.8 million km2. This represents about 20 per cent of theworld’s remaining moist tropical forest. The Congo Basin forests are the mostbiologically diverse in Africa. Since the 1930s, about 6 per cent of the forests in theregion have been declared as ‘protected areas’ (accorded the status of National Parks,Fauna Reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, etc.). Many of these protected areas are stillrelatively undisturbed, mainly as a result of access difficulties that have safeguardedthem from large-scale deforestation. The human population density is generally low,in part due to resettlement Programmes during the colonial era. In the past ten years,the Congo Basin has become a major focus for international organizations andinstitutions interested in the conservation of biological diversity. These support theregion’s governments in establishing and managing protected areas.

The Dja ReserveThe Dja reserve is the largest protected area in Cameroon, covering 5,260km2 in theCentre and East Provinces of Cameroon. It is located 243km southeast of Yaoundé (thecapital). The Dja River forms its natural boundary, except to the southwest. The area

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was classified as a Réserve de faune et de chasse in 1950, a Faunal Reserve in 1973,and a Biosphere Reserve in 1981; it was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1984.Dja is an IUCN category IV protected area. It has an equatorial climate with two rainfallpeaks, a mean temperature of 23.3°C and mean annual rainfall of 1,570mm. The reliefis fairly flat except in the southeast, although a major fault line on the southern edge hasled to the formation of deeper valleys.

Ecologically, the Dja Reserve is characterized by a deciduous and semi-deciduousforest mixed with extensive swamps. The vegetation mainly comprises dense evergreenCongo rain forest with the canopy at 30-40m rising to 60m. Around 43 tree speciesform the high canopy. The shrub layer contains over 53 species. The other mainvegetation types are the herbaceous layer, swamp vegetation, secondary forest aroundabandoned villages, and recently abandoned cocoa and coffee plantations.

Dja harbours 109 mammal species, including threatened species such as the gorilla andelephant. The reserve has 360 bird species, of which 80 are migratory. Bates's weaver isendemic to southern Cameroon and the grey-necked picathartes is believed to beendemic to Dja. Reptiles include two threatened crocodile species; there are 62 speciesof fish (IUCN-Dja & ECOFAC, 1999).

Human population is low (2 people/km2). 5,000 people, mostly pygmies, are reported tobe living within the reserve, mainly in small encampments, maintaining an essentiallytraditional lifestyle (Moucharou, 1999). Some villages of Bantu and Pygmies (Baka) areestablished close to the reserve. In all, about 30,000 people depend directly on theresources of the reserve.

Since the establishment of Dja as a protected area in 1950, management has beenrestricted to resource protection and anti-poaching activities. However, the singlewarden and seven guards have not been enough to ensure protection. While there is nocommercial timber exploitation within the reserve, logging and mining take place closeby. Although access is restricted, both Pygmies and Bantu are free to hunt around andwithin the reserve using traditional techniques. Villagers also fish in the Dja River.Subsistence plots (cassava, maize, taro, etc) encroach on the reserve. Commercialpoaching is common, while gathering of forest products for home consumption andcommercial purposes also occurs. Small-scale production of cash crops, such as coffeeand cocoa, takes place around and within the reserve. Since 1992, two conservationprojects Dja-ECOFAC project (since 1992) and IUCN-Dja project (since 1995), andone development project (SNV-SDDL) have been established to support thegovernment to manage the reserve.

IUCN-Dja ProjectThe IUCN-Dja project, funded by the Dutch Government and jointly implemented byIUCN and the Cameroon Ministry of Environment and Forestry operates in thesoutheastern part of the reserve. The project aims to contribute to the conservation andsustainable use of biodiversity in the Dja Reserve and its periphery, particularly in theLomié region. The project has had technical support from the Service Néerlandais desVolontaires (for Ecodevelopment activities) and the Gouden Ark Foundation (forresearch on mammals. The field-testing in Dja worked closely with the IUCN project.Project staff were encouraged to comment on, and add to the assessment system,

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which has the potential to be used to assess entire protected areas, not just individualprojects within them.

Evaluating the Management Effectiveness of DjaTwo questionnaires were used to assess management effectiveness (one for staff andone for local communities) based upon the WCPA framework (Hockings 1997).Background research included a literature survey and was followed up by site visits,interviews and analysis (see Hakizumwami, 2000). After collection of data andinformation, the results were analysed to formulate conclusions and recommendationsfor an action plan for adaptive management. Two methods were used – a SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis and scoring.

The SWOT analysis took place within the framework developed in Hockings (1997)and looked at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats under the headings ofdesign and planning, inputs and influences, processes, outputs and outcomes. Scoringwas carried out using a scorecard also adapted from Hockings (1997). Althoughsubjective, this was done to provide an idea about the level of managementeffectiveness and to serve as a basis to evaluate changes over time. The score is atrade-off of weaknesses against strengths in relation to predefined managementobjectives. Generally a four-level rating scale was adopted. Additional points wereadded to issues of high importance to give them more weight. The level of themanagement effectiveness was related to a percentage. Although rating wassubjective, the results can show the manager which areas require improvement.

Following discussions with project staff, the criteria (and indicators) for theassessment of the management effectiveness of protected areas within the CongoBasin context were agreed upon, including:

• Status of the protected area and law enforcement• Vulnerability of the protected area• Information availability• Planning efficiency• Resourcing (financial, human, material)• Partnerships• Incentives for local community participation• Conflict resolution

The SWOT analysis and scoring were together used to develop some generalconclusions relating to the reserve, as outlined below.

Summary of the Main Conclusions of the Dja Field Test

Status of the PA: Biodiversity richness of the Dja Reserve and its periphery makeseffective management essential. However, this also leads to conflicting interestamongst different parties (logging companies, government institutions, localcommunities, conservation agencies, etc.). For effective management to be achieved,the concept of short-term protected area management 'project' must be replaced by aconcept of a 'programme' for protected area management, which addresses long-termplanning and resource requirements. Such an approach will allow intervention thattakes account of the different influences on the management of the area.

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Pressures on the reserve: more investigation should be made of the logging activitiesaround the Dja Reserve and the impact on its management of immigration into thereserve as a result of logging.

Legislation: Although there is a political will to establish a network of protected areasin the region, this calls for institutional backing to be mobilized at different levels.Inadequate legislation governing protected areas, inappropriate land-use allocation(particularly the logging concessions close to the reserve and within the ecologicalcorridors), and insufficient funding all undermine effective management, especiallyas, in the short term at least, they are outside the control of the protected areamanagement team. Legislation governing protected areas also overlooks the localcommunities' customary rights to use resources in the protected areas.

Natural resources management systems: Human populations within and around theDja Reserve rely almost entirely on natural resources for their survival. They have,however, a tradition of preservation of natural resources within their customaryterritories. Their cultural strategies for conservation - such as totem, taboos,customary sanctuaries, respect for others' territories, and vigilance committees toregulate resource use - create an opportunity for effective management of the Reserve.

Financial and human resources sustainability: Given the international value of theDja Reserve, there is a need for the international community's commitment to ensureeffective management. This requires sustainable funding and technical support toimplement plans. However, donors have to keep in mind that natural resourcesconservation is a long process – success should be evaluated over the long term.

Partnership: Generally, threats to the Dja reserve originate from outside the reserveand most of them are beyond the control of the protected area manager in the shortterm. Consultation with key stakeholders and main local actors, along with conflictresolution skills, is therefore vital for effective management.

Relations with the local population: The ability of forest people to influence thedecisions taken which affect their livelihoods is still limited due to the lack ofinformation and absence of formal and legal mechanisms to present their views. Mostconservation initiatives are designed and implemented without the input of localcommunities or regard to the customary laws and land-use patterns.

Lesson learned using the methodologyEfficient assessment of the effective management of the protected areas must involvecollection of maximum information at low cost while creating an awareness of theaudience. This needs an assessor with wide experience in natural resourcesmanagement and sufficient skills and capacity to use participatory methodsintegrating biophysical, as well as, socio-economic aspects.

The main limitation recorded during the process of field-testing the system for themanagement effectiveness of the Dja Reserve was the suspicion manifested by theprotected areas management team toward the assessment. Introductory meetings werenecessary to explain the objectives and the importance of assessing managementeffectiveness. It is important to involve protected area staff in the process of

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assessment, as this allows for both an increased awareness of managementeffectiveness and the building of confidence between the assessor and the projectstaff.

Where possible, discussions with local communities must avoid participation of amember of the project staff. If translation is needed, it is better to allow theinterviewees to select their translator. This creates an environment of open andinteractive discussions and prevents reluctance to provide maximum and accurateinformation.

Due to the fact that management effectiveness is affected by internal as well asexternal factors, assessment of the management effectiveness of the protected areasneeds to involve a maximum number of key stakeholders.

Issues that may need more in-depth investigation in the assessment system are:

• Impact of the creation of the protected area on local communities livelihoods(income, well-being, vulnerability, social organization, food security, use ofnatural resources) and on the local communities behaviour towards the use ofnatural resources

• Influence of the funding agency in the management effectiveness of the protectedarea

• Commitment of governmental institutions for the management of the protectedarea

• The international community's commitment (in particularly for sites ofinternational importance) for the management of protected areas

• Integration in the protected area network (regional or national)• In case of joint management of the protected area, as in the case of the Dja

Reserve, the complementarity between different actors should be assessed.

Also, within the Dja Reserve itself, more investigation should be made of the loggingactivities around the reserve and the impact of immigration into the reserve as a resultof logging, on the management of the Reserve.

ReferencesBesselink C and Sips, P (eds) (1998); The Congo Basin (Human and NaturalResources)/Le Basin du Congo: Resources humaines et naturelles. NetherlandsCommittee for IUCN, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Brown, K and Ekoko F (1999); Forest encounters: Searching for synergy betweenagents of forest change in Southern Cameroon. Report for CIROR, Yaoundé,Cameroon

CIFOR (1999); Summary of key research findings on: The causes of forest coverchange in the humid forest zone of Cameroon. Report presented in Yaoundé,Cameroon, March 24, 1999

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Dethier, M (1995); Etude sur la chasse au Cameroun, Rapport pour ECOFAC,Libreville Gabon

Dudley, N and Stolton, S [editors] (2000); Management Effectiveness of ProtectedAreas, arborvitae special produced by IUCN, WWF and the World Bank, Gland,Switzerland

Doumenge, C (1998); Evaluation des sites critiques pour la conservation de labiodiversité forestièr du Cametoun, du Gabon et de la Guinée Equatoriale. Rapportpour CEFDHAC, UICN-BRAC, Yaoundé, Cameroun

ECOFAC-UICN-Dja (1999); Plan d’Amenagement de la Reserve de faune du Dja,Draft

Hakizumwami E (1998); Community Wildlife Management in Central Africa: Aregional review. Report for the International Institute for Environment andDevelopment (IIED). Evaluating Eden Project, London, UK

Hakizumwami E (2000); Protected Areas Management Effectiveness Assessment forCentral Africa, IUCN/WWF Forest Innovations Project, Gland, Switzerland

Hockings, M (1997); Evaluating Management Effectiveness: A Framework forEvaluating Management of Protected Areas, Draft discussion paper, IUCN/WCPA

Huijbregts B and Obiang N L S (1999); Chasse commerciale de viande de broussedans la concession forestière de BORDAMUR: Premiers observations de la troisièmemission de reconnaissance du Projet Minkébé du 15 juin au 17 août 1999, ProjetWWF-Minkébé Project, Libreville

MINEF and UICN (1993); Réserve de Faune du Dja (région Lomié): Conservation etutilisation Durable de la diversité biologique (Document de proposition de projet)

Mouncharou, G (1997); Projet Dja Lomié: Rapport d'avancement d'activités (Octobre1995-Mai 1997), Projet UICN-Dja, Lomié, Cameroun

Projet UICN-Dja (1998); Projet de Conservation et d’Utilisation Durable de laDiversité Biologique de la Reserve de Faune du Dja. Rapport Semestriel (Janvier -Juin 1998), Projet UICN-Dja, Lomié, Cameroun

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Outcomes-Based Evaluation of Management for ProtectedAreas – A Methodology for Incorporating Evaluation intoManagement Plans

Glenys Jones

AbstractEvaluation of management performance for protected areas is an essential ingredientof sound conservation management. Without evidence about the on-ground outcomesof management, it is difficult for managers and stakeholders to determine the extent towhich management is actually achieving its objectives. The integration of evaluationprograms into core management systems – such as management plans – offers anumber of significant benefits for protected area management. In particular it:• encourages the development of clear management objectives with articulated

criteria against which management performance will be assessed;• establishes programs of monitoring, evaluation and reporting to be undertaken as

part of the prescribed actions under the plan, and so increases the likelihood thatinformed evaluations will take place; and

• allows the findings of evaluation to feed back into and guide ongoing managementso as to progressively improve management performance.

This paper presents a methodology for incorporating evaluation of managementoutcomes into management plans for protected areas. The methodology is based onthe approach being applied to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area inAustralia.

Glenys JonesPlanning Officer (World Heritage)Department of Primary Industries, Water and EnvironmentP.O. Box 44AHobart 7001TasmaniaAUSTRALIAemail: glenysj@dpiwe.tas.gov.au

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Outcomes-Based Evaluation of Management for ProtectedAreas – A Methodology for Incorporating Evaluation intoManagement Plans

Glenys Jones

IntroductionWorldwide there is a growing expectation that the performance of management for protected areasshould be able to be demonstrated through evidence of results rather than on the basis of educatedguesses, ‘gut feelings’, or assurances of ‘trust us we’re the experts’. A number of protected areamanagers are responding to this call by seeking new ways to demonstrate management performanceobjectively. This paper examines the prevailing management system for protected areas and thenpresents a methodology for applying a better system of management which incorporates monitoring,evaluation, and reporting on management performance. The proposed methodology fosters adaptivemanagement and continuous improvement in management performance, and is proving both practicaland beneficial to management of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in Australia.

The ability to demonstrate the results or outcomes of management has many advantages. Theseinclude:• providing feedback to management about the extent to which previous actions are achieving

management objectives;• providing the opportunity to learn from past management experience and so progressively improve

management performance;• providing a more informed basis from which to make ongoing management decisions and for

allocating and prioritizing management effort and resources;• providing the necessary link to public accountability and to those funding management by

demonstrating the outcomes for expenditure on protected area management.

Why Outcomes-based Evaluation?The purpose of management is to achieve objectives. This is the primary interest of governments,funding bodies and stakeholders. Consequently, the principal measure of management performance forprotected areas should be the extent to which the management objectives are achieved. Evaluations thatseek to demonstrate performance against management objectives should focus primarily on outcomes.

Performance information about inputs, process and outputs can significantly contribute to an outcomes-based evaluation. This type of information is often of particular interest to the agency administeringthe funds for managing protected areas.

Management System without EvaluationCurrently, few protected areas have management systems in place to monitor andevaluate the outcomes of management. Management of protected areas is typicallybased on a simple management system that consists of management objectives andactions that are considered appropriate to achieving those objectives (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Management System without Evaluation

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Management Actions(How are we going to get there?)

Management Objectives(Where do we want to go?

What do we want achieved?)

Management Systemwithout Evaluation

Without a linked program of monitoring and evaluation to provide evidence about the outcomes ofmanagement, it is difficult to know the extent to which management actions are effective in achievingthe objectives. Managers who rely on a management system without evaluation against objectives can,in a sense, be ‘flying blind’ and lack the necessary feedback to learn from, and improve on, pastmanagement approaches. In short, evaluation is needed to provide a reality check to show whatworked, what didn’t, and to open the doors to better ways of achieving management objectives.

Evaluation of management performance can no longer be seen as an ‘optional extra’ but must betreated as a fundamental component of sound conservation management.

Management System with EvaluationThe incorporation of an outcomes-based system of evaluation into management forprotected areas provides a mechanism that reveals whether management actions areachieving the objectives. If the management objectives are regarded as ‘where wewant to go’, and the management actions are ‘how we’re going to get there’, thenevaluation provides the navigation system that reveals ‘where we are, and whetherwe’re getting where we want to go’ (see Figure 2). This process is consistent withinternational standards for environmental management systems (e.g. ISO14004:1996)6.

6 Standards New Zealand, Standards Association of Australia. Joint Technical CommitteeQR/11. Environmental Management Australian/New Zealand Standard. ‘Environmentalmanagement systems: general guidelines on principles, systems and supporting techniques’AS/NZS ISO 14004:1996.

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Figure 2: Management System with Evaluation

Management Objectives(Where do we want to go?

What do we want achieved?)

Management Actions(How are we going

to get there?)

Review Management(What needs to happen to improve

management performance?)

Adjust management actions?

Improve overallmanagement

arrangements?

Management Systemwith Evaluation

Evaluation(Where are we? Are we getting

where we want to go?)

Monitorperformanceindicators

Define keydesired

outcomes

Report findingsand

recommendations

Assess evidence abouton-ground outcomes

The Seven Key Steps in an Evaluative Management SystemThe key steps in developing and applying a process of monitoring and evaluation that feeds back intomanagement to improve ongoing management performance is outlined in Figure 3. As with allmanagement planning, it is important to seek the involvement of relevant stakeholders in key aspects ofthis process.

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Figure 3: The Seven Key Steps in an Evaluative Management System

Step 1: Identify management objectives↓↓

Step 2: Define key desired outcomes↓↓

Step 3: Identify performance indicators↓↓

Step 4: Undertake monitoring↓↓

Step 5: Periodically assess results↓↓

Step 6: Report findings and recommendations↓↓

Step 7: Adjust management as necessary

These seven steps are discussed below in the light of experience gained from applyingthe approach to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

1. Identify management objectives. Objectives of management are usually based on legislation,corporate goals or other mandates (such as the obligations of World Heritage management).Objectives at this level are usually of a general or broad nature and require further interpretation toclarify their practical meaning with respect to a particular protected area. An example of this typeof objective is: ‘To conserve natural biological diversity’.

2. Define key desired outcomes for each objective. Clearly articulate specific tangible desiredoutcomes for each objective. These may be regarded as ‘mini vision statements’ that reflect arange of different aspects of each objective, and provide a practical interpretation of what eachmanagement objective would deliver if it were fully realised. This step helps to clarify what ismeant by the objective and assists in setting defined goals. Statements of key desired outcomeshelp to focus management effort on achieving outcomes, and provide a basis for evaluatingmanagement performance.

In developing statements of key desired outcomes, it sometimes helps to considerthe concepts of ‘maintaining what we’ve got’; ‘improving the currentsituation’ and ‘restoring the damage’. A cascade of statements may berequired to deliver specific statements that have direct practical relevance tomanagement of a particular protected area. In some circumstances, it may beappropriate and desirable to express key desired outcomes as targets orlimits.

Key desired outcomes (KDOs) derived from the example objective cited abovemight include:

• KDO 1.1: Maintenance of the full range of species, communities, ecosystems,genetic diversity and biogeographic integrity. No loss of native species orcommunities.Ø The endangered ground parrot Pezoporus dooinporli has been delisted and viable

populations now exist within and outside the parkØ The park continues to support secure populations of all other native flora and fauna.

• KDO 1.2: No establishment of introduced species due directly or indirectly to humanactivities.

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• KDO 1.3: Restoration of natural biodiversity in formerly degraded communities or systems.Ø The feral population of goats in the Old Farm area has been removedØ Populations of the lesser-spangled bandicoot have returned to the Old Farm area.

3. Identify performance indicators. Identify a range of performance areas and indicators that couldpotentially be measured to provide information about the extent to which each key desiredoutcome is being achieved (or is failing to be achieved). In developing performance indicators, itusually helps to ask: ‘how would we know if management was working well?’ And just asimportantly, ‘how would we know if management was failing?’ The answers to these questionsidentify a range of outcomes that could realistically be anticipated, and usually suggest the sorts ofperformance areas and indicators that should be monitored to provide evidence about managementperformance.

Performance indicators related to an objective/key desired outcome are often quitesite-specific and closely related to the management issues and values of theparticular protected area. The identification of meaningful and practicalperformance indicators usually relies heavily on input from those with localmanagement knowledge and/or specialised expertise. With knowledge andexperience of the system, it becomes practical to set well-founded targets or limitsfor performance indicators.

Performance areas/indicators for the key desired outcomes cited above mightinclude:Indicators for KDO 1.1: Changes in the conservation status of species in the

reserve. Changes in population parameters of selectedspecies: distribution, abundance, fertility rates, etc. of P.dooinporli.

Indicators for KDO 1.2: Changes in number, distribution, and abundance ofintroduced species. Changes in mapped areas free ofintroduced species. Evidence of new introductions ofspecies.

Indicators for KDO 1.3: Evidence of elimination of introduced species (goats)from the reserve. Distribution and abundance of lesserspangled bandicoot in the Old Farm areas.

4. Put in place monitoring programs to collect data about selected performance indicators.Monitoring programs should be developed and implemented on the basis of the prioritized needsfor performance information. Selection of the performance indicators to be monitored should beguided by the importance of the information in relation to the objectives of management, itsusefulness in informing management decisions, and the practicality of its collection. It is oftenprudent to start with a basic monitoring program for a set of core indicators and to expand themonitoring program as appropriate. It is important to ensure that baseline data are collected earlyin the management period so that changes in conditions over the management period can bedetected. Evaluation methodologies and data need to be scientifically valid and stand up toexternal scrutiny.

5. Periodically assess the results being achieved against the desired outcomes. Assessmentsshould focus on the results achieved in relation to the stated objectives and key desired outcomes,and on identifying key factors that have helped or hindered management performance. Data inputsnormally include both quantitative data (e.g. measured data about performance indicators) andqualitative data (e.g. critical comment about management performance by those with managementresponsibility and/or a legitimate evaluative role). It is often valuable to assess both relativeperformance (e.g. whether results have improved or deteriorated over the management period) andabsolute performance (e.g. how satisfactory or unsatisfactory the current situation is in relation to

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goals). The inclusion of external participants in the assessment team (e.g. experts in particularmanagement issues, or management advisory groups) can enhance the objectivity and/orcredibility of the assessment and in some circumstances provide important additional informationand insights that may not be readily sourced from within the management agency. Periodicassessments allow changes in the performance of management over time to be demonstrated.

6. Report the findings and recommendations of the evaluation to those who need to know, whenthey need to know. Reports on the findings of evaluation should identify areas wheremanagement has been performing well (i.e. achieving objectives) as well as areas wheremanagement needs to improve. The reasons for areas of weak performance or critical gaps ininformation should guide the formulation of recommendations for improving ongoingmanagement. Note that if early results show that current management is failing to achieve theobjectives, it is essential that decision-makers get the facts when they need to know them andknow what needs to be done to improve management. If the results of evaluations don’t get backto and influence those who can change ongoing management, the benefits of evaluation can belost. Reports on the performance of management are usually of interest to site managers, fundingbodies, stakeholders and the public. It may be appropriate to tailor the method, style, and level ofdetail of reporting to meet the needs of different audiences.

7. Adjust ongoing management to better achieve the objectives. The real test of an evaluation isthe extent to which the findings feed back into, change and improve ongoing managementperformance for the protected area. Management processes must establish appropriate linkages toallow the findings and recommendations of evaluation to input to and influence decision-makingthat determines management actions, prioritization and allocation of human and financialresources.

Benefits of Integrating Monitoring and Evaluation into Management PlansThe integration of monitoring and evaluation into management plans for protected areas offers twosignificant benefits:

1. It gets monitoring and evaluation to happenWorldwide experience demonstrates that even where adaptive management and continuousimprovement in management are supported in principle too often, in practice, monitoring andevaluation programs are allowed to be displaced by other more ‘urgent’ (though often less important)day-to-day management activities.

The integration of monitoring and evaluation into core management systems for protected areas – suchas the management plan – makes it more likely that monitoring and evaluation will be undertaken aspart of the suite of ‘normal’ management activities.

2. It strengthens evaluations by providing for the collection of baseline dataAttempts to retrospectively assess the effectiveness of management are usuallysignificantly compromised by the lack of baseline information about pre-managementintervention conditions. The most valuable and informative evaluations occur whendata about performance indicators have been collected before (or during the earlyphases of) active management so that ‘before’ and ‘after’ data can be compared andso allow for changes to be detected. The inclusion in management plans ofprescriptions for the early establishment of monitoring programs for selectedperformance indicators paves the way for stronger and more meaningful evaluationsof management performance.

Management Plans with EvaluationA management plan, which incorporates an outcomes-based system of monitoring,evaluation and feedback that fosters continuous improvement in managementperformance, could be expected to include the following elements:

- Management objectives

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- Statements of key desired outcomes derived from the objectives ofmanagement

- Prescriptions for management actions aimed at achieving the objectives- Prescriptions for monitoring selected performance indicators to inform

the evaluation of management performance- Requirements for reporting on the performance of management (i.e. the

findings of evaluation)- Requirements for the periodic review of management and/or the

management plan.

The 1999 Management Plan for the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area7

provides an example of such a plan.

DiscussionApplying Evaluation in Diverse Management ContextsThe management context and funding levels for protected areas vary greatly and influence the capacityof a managing agency to monitor and evaluate management performance. Nevertheless, the process ofevaluation presented in this paper is applicable across a broad range of management contexts andbudgets. Protected areas which operate on a low management budget could realistically only expect toimplement a very limited monitoring program; however, even the establishment of one or two goodmonitoring programs for performance indicators which address critical management issues can provideextremely valuable feedback to management.

Monitoring and evaluation programs can be tailored to be as simple or complex ascircumstances allow – simply start with the most critical and/or strategic monitoringprograms and work out from there as circumstances permit.

How much detail to include in the management plan?In developing a management plan that incorporates evaluation, the question arises asto how much detail of the performance indicators and monitoring program to includein the management plan itself.

Tasmania’s experience suggests that in small or relatively simple management areasor those with low management budgets, the monitoring and evaluation programshould be fully incorporated into the management plan. In other cases, and especiallyin the case of large or complex systems or areas with relatively high managementbudgets, it may be more appropriate to include in the management plan only the basicframework or core elements of the monitoring and evaluation program, and to detailand/or continue developing the performance indicators through a more flexiblesupporting document. This approach recognizes that the current state of knowledgeand experience in the use of performance indicators for protected areas is as yetrudimentary and in a state of rapid evolution. Where there is the capacity to continuedeveloping and refining performance indicators and monitoring programs, it may beappropriate not to ‘lock’ these elements of the evaluation framework into the statutorymanagement plan but to allow the performance indicators to be added, refined ordeleted through experience. This approach is proving appropriate in the case of the

7 1999 Parks and Wildlife Service. (Part of the Department of Primary Industries, Water andEnvironment). ‘Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area Management Plan 1999’.Hobart, Tasmania. Also available as a downloadable document atwww.parks.tas.gov.au/wha/whahome.html under ‘Management/Scientific and TechnicalPublications’.

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Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (for further details, see Jones and Dunn(in prep.)8).

Other Types of Performance InformationPriority for expenditure on evaluation programs should normally be given to monitoring and reportingon the outcomes of management. However, other types of performance information can also contributesignificantly to an outcomes-based evaluation.

Performance information across a wide range of management inputs, processes, andexternal factors can be gathered very cost effectively by simply asking those withmanagement responsibility and/or a legitimate evaluative role to identify the keyfactors that have helped or hindered management performance. This approach tapsthe insights, knowledge and experience of those in a position to know what reallywent on and what really affected management effectiveness. It also provides apowerful means of scanning and sorting through an enormous range of potentialperformance indicators that may be affecting management performance withoutincurring the expense of formally monitoring them.

Other performance information that is often important for protected areas is the extent to which theplan’s prescriptions have been implemented, and information about the financial and staff resources,and expenditure over the management period.

Practical Benefits of Evaluation ProgramsIn practice, the application of an outcomes-based system of evaluating management performance forthe Tasmanian Wilderness has resulted in a number of changes and benefits:

• Application of an evaluative approach to preparation of the management planresulted in a more systematic and transparent linkage between the managementobjectives and the actions prescribed in the management plan. It also revealedseveral gaps that had previously existed between management responsibilities andmanagement actions, which were consequently rectified.

• The simple knowledge that the management plan and its implementation are beingmonitored and reported has acted as a prompt to invigorate and maintainresponsible officers’ focus on implementing the management plan’s prescriptions.

• Application of an evaluative approach to management is bringing about a changein the way managers are viewing their role and responsibilities. For example, it isassisting the agency culture in changing from one that in the past has not expectedcritical analysis of management performance to one with an increased emphasison accountability for the results of management. There is a growing focus onbeing able to document and demonstrate the results of management, and decliningreliance on ‘trust us, we’re the experts’.

• Involvement in the development of monitoring and evaluation programs isencouraging managers to take responsibility for, and pride in, the results achieved.

8 Jones, Glenys and Dunn (Hocking), Helen (in prep) ‘Experience in outcomes-basedevaluation of management for the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area – a casestudy’. In Evaluating Management Effectiveness – a Framework for Evaluating Management ofProtected Areas. IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Management EffectivenessTask Force.

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Program managers have become more inclined to articulate and focus on theoutcomes they are seeking, and to assess the quality of their strategies and actionsin the light of these targets. Preparation of reports on the findings of evaluation isenabling those involved in work programs to see their work, alongside others’,from a different and broader perspective, and to take pride in the contribution theyare making to management progress.

• The opportunity for managers to provide critical comments (both positive andnegative) on management performance places value on their knowledge andexpertise, and allows them to contribute directly to improving ongoingmanagement performance.

• The findings of evaluation have, in some cases, strongly influenced ongoingmanagement decisions and allocation of management resources.

• The process and findings of monitoring and evaluation have in some cases ‘takenthe heat out’ of management decision-making through the systematic collectionand use of information for decision-making and the transparency of that process.In other cases, while not achieving resolution of controversial issues, the processhas served to highlight social or political barriers to management effectiveness.

• The development and implementation of a system of evaluation for the TasmanianWilderness World Heritage Area is providing a model for the development ofsimilar performance-based management approaches for other protected areas inTasmania and elsewhere.

Encouraging Wider Application of Evaluative ManagementNational and international bodies and agencies with responsibilities or interests inprotected area management could play a significant role in encouraging the widerapplication of evaluative management by taking a leading role in progressing thefollowing initiatives.

Management Planning Manuals and GuidelinesThe adoption of an evaluative approach to management can be encouraged andassisted through the development of agency, state, national and/or international levelplanning manuals that guide the preparation of management plans for protected areas.The inclusion in generic planning manuals of guidelines, instructions and examplesrelated to monitoring, evaluation and reporting on management performance canprovide an effective means of accelerating the widespread application of evaluativemanagement.

Performance Standards for Protected Area CategoriesThe development of performance standards for protected area categories can assist in focusingmanagement effort on core obligations of management and — in the absence of more fully developedcriteria — can provide a ‘default’ basis for evaluating management performance for protected areas.

In Tasmania, management standards for reserves are being developed to provide a general benchmarkof the expected standards of management to be met in each type of reserve. The standards are basedvery closely on the objectives of management for the reserve category as specified in legislation. Thestandards provide a starting point for developing more detailed ‘key desired outcomes’ for particularreserves, and can assist managers in developing programs of monitoring, evaluation and reporting on

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management performance. In reserves for which there is no current management plan, the standardsalone provide a basis against which to evaluate management.

The development of internationally accepted performance standards for protected areacategories, such as World Heritage Areas, could significantly assist the application ofperformance-based management and provide a standardized basis for evaluating andreporting on management performance.

Reports on the State of Protected AreasThe development of agency, state, national and/or international requirements andprotocols for reporting on the outcomes of protected area management could hastenthe adoption of performance-based management. In some circumstances appropriatereporting vehicles may already exist that simply require adjustment to focus morestrongly on the outcomes of management and on the state of conservation of theprotected area.

Accreditation of Protected Area ManagementAs performance-based management of protected areas becomes more widespread, a growing need foran independent system or process of quality assurance or accreditation for protected area managementand evaluation of management performance will emerge.

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PAN Parks – Well-Managed Protected Areas Ideal for Sustainable Tourism

Harri Karjalainen

AbstractThe PAN Parks project is a new initiative promoting tourism as a basis for sustainablenature conservation. PAN Parks aim to provide a nature conservation based responseto the growing market for nature-oriented tourism by creating a quality brand, whichstands for:

• An expanding network of well-managed protected areas with high conservationvalue

• Sustainable tourism development of regions and local communities surroundingprotected areas

• Responsible high quality nature-based experiences for visitors and tourists• Creation of public awareness, support and appreciation for nature conservation• Generation of wide political and financial support at all levels for nature

conservation.

The use of the PAN Parks trademark is restricted to protected areas and companiesthat fulfil the PAN Parks Principles and Criteria. Protected areas and associatedbusiness partners, which wish to use PAN Parks registered trademark and logo, mustundergo verification by an independent (possibly local) certification organization.

Harri KarjalainenWWF-FinlandLintulahdenkatu 1000500 Helsinki 50FINLANDEmail: harri.karjalainen@wwf.fi

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PAN Parks – Well-Managed Protected Areas Ideal for Sustainable Tourism

Harri Karjalainen

The ProblemThe biodiversity of European nature is decreasing. This is reflected for example in thegrowing numbers of endangered forest dwelling species listed in the national Red Databooks.

Though protected areas already exist in Europe - National Parks, World Heritagesites, areas with a European Diploma, etc., many unfortunately do not effectivelyprotect biodiversity. A National Park in the UK or Netherlands, for example, doesnot meet the criteria for a National Park as defined by IUCN. There is clearly a needto improve management quality.

Europeans have no awareness of this; in fact, they have no awareness of their naturalheritage. There is no area in Europe as well known and loved as Yellowstone in theUnited States. As this awareness is lacking, there is no pride and no sense ofownership. Thus there is not even a fight to save Europe’s last remaining naturalstrongholds - logging in Yellowstone would be unthinkable, logging Bialowieza is areality.

Protected areas are not popular and local people seldom support them. We hardly everhear good news on how protected areas benefit local people. In fact, protected areasare, in many cases, seen as a threat rather than an opportunity for economicdevelopment.

Nature conservation is not a hot item under public debate and does not influence thevoting behaviour of the vast majority of the citizens. Lack of political support atinternational, national and regional levels leads to lack of coordination ofconservation efforts and lack of government funding. This makes it very hard formany protected area managers to fulfil their conservation goals.

Last but not least the negative impacts of the rapid worldwide growth of tourism on theenvironment are causing serious and justified concern, both within and outside thetourism industry. There is clearly an urgent need to reverse these negative impacts.

New approaches neededWWF believes that these prevailing conditions are making every day natureconservation work very difficult and must be tackled. WWF believes there isdefinitely a need for new approaches.

Roughly two years ago, WWF and the Dutch Leisure Company, Molecaten Group,and their partners, developed the PAN Parks idea. The idea is simple and exciting -marry nature conservation and tourism on a European scale. In other words, put aneconomic value on nature conservation.

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PAN Parks aim to provide a nature conservation based response to the growingmarket of nature-oriented tourism by creating a quality brand. This seal of approvalwould stand for:

• An expanding network of well-managed protected areas with high conservationvalue;

• Areas widely known by Europeans as natural capitals of their continent - ofwhich they are proud. Like the Acropolis in Athens or the Louvre in Paris,which are valued as home for the continent’s cultural treasures, Parks should beas highly valued as home to the continent’s natural treasures;

• A ‘must see’ for tourists and wildlife lovers where they will enjoy high qualitynature-based experiences;

• Creation of wider public and political support for the protected areasthrough changing attitudes and enhancing economic value of protectedareas;

• Greater share of economic benefits to the region through generation ofincome for parks, and creation of new jobs for people in rural areas.

Parks on boardThe idea generated a lot of enthusiasm and, as a result, the PAN Parks process isnow well underway. Although there are no real PAN Parks as yet, the details of theconcept is still being worked out. Nonetheless, there are now a number of parks whohave signed a letter of intent - a declaration of their willingness to take part in thePAN Parks initiative and to cooperate as pilot areas. The seven protected areas in sixcountries are: Abruzzo in Italy, Bialoweza and Biebrza in Poland, Dadia in Greece,Duna-Drava in Hungary, Slovensky Raj in Slovakia and Sumava in the CzechRepublic. In addition, there are many more parks and commercial partners wishingto come on board.

Change tourism from a threat into an opportunityPAN Parks aim to change tourism from a threat into an opportunity by buildingpartnerships with nature conservation organizations, travel agencies, the businesscommunity, and other interest groups on a local, national and international level.

Protected natural areas have enormous economic potential. Tourism is one of thebiggest and fastest growing industries. In 1996 nearly 600 million people travelledinternationally and WTO predicts this figure will reach one billion by the year 2010.This creates revenues estimated at 10 to 12 per cent of the world economic outputand accounts for one in nine jobs.

Green destinations are an area of economic growth which National Park managersneed to be aware. Demand for various forms of green tourism is rising by as much as10 to 30 per cent each year. Protected area visitors who stop in villages bordering

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parks overnight or buy supplies will generate economic benefit for the regionsurrounding protected areas.

With more than 260 million annual visits, national parks in the US, for example play akey role in the travel and tourism sector. In contrast, Europe lags far behind.However, Europe possesses enormous natural potential. Not only are there manypotential visitors to natural areas in Europe, but Europe hosts attractive natural areasthat are ideally suited for sustainable tourism.

Verification – quality guaranteedSince the tourism market is a highly competitive and since nature-oriented tourists areusually very demanding, only a high quality offer, including unique nature-basedexperiences, will be successful.

PAN Parks will be a reliable ‘trademark’, which guarantees quality for tourism andnature. To strictly control this balance, a system of verification is necessary with theuse of the PAN Parks trademark restricted to parks and companies that fulfil thePAN Parks Principles and Criteria (P&C).

Parks and associated business partners wishing to use the PAN Parks registeredtrademark and logo must undergo verification by an independent (possibly local)certification organization, under recognized standards.

Principles and CriteriaThe P&C form the core of the PAN Parks project. They determine what PAN Parkswill look like. The principle guiding the drafting of the P&C process has been todevelop strict quality standards, applicable to different types of nature and theadministration of protected areas in Europe.

From the beginning, a strong emphasis has been put on criteria concerning themanagement of protected areas and management of visitors (Principles 1-3). PANParks want to maintain these high and demanding standards and ensure that they arenot compromised. The PAN Parks label must prove watertight so that endangeredflora and fauna in a protected area are safeguarded, and that tourists can visit the parkwithout causing any harm to nature.

PAN Parks want to raise the standard of protected area management. Europe's naturedeserves full protection and protected areas must be the places where forests candevelop without any human intervention. Animals should be free to roam in peaceaway from hunters, landscapes remain unfragmented by roads, power lines and otherhuman infrastructures.

PAN Parks are large areas, at least 25,000 hectares. Strictly protected core areas mustbe at least 10,000 hectares. Management of the core areas should aim at maximizingfree natural development. The protected area must have a management plan, and itsimplementation must be supported by relevant research and monitoring.

A visitor management plan is required, including, for example, an inventory of thenumber and type of visitors, an estimate of future trends. The PAN Parks logo should

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be awarded only to those parks which can offer a variety of nature-based activities andfacilities, and where visitors can observe and experience wildlife and other naturalfeatures without disturbing nature.

The PAN Parks Principle 4 sets criteria for a sustainable tourism developmentstrategy. In this case, it is the strategy, developed by Park managers and relevantinterest groups in the region, which will be evaluated. Principle 4 is the cornerstone,safeguarding that tourism supports nature conservation, and guarantees that tourismis not introduced in sensitive areas. It is of equal importance to ensure that nature-oriented tourism will bring long-term benefits and jobs to local communitiessurrounding the protected area.

Tourism, accommodation and other commercial partners wishing to use the PANParks trademark and logo must also follow the Principles and Criteria. Principle 5covers criteria and indicators for commercial partners. They include tourism,accommodation and other commercial partners who engage actively in theimplementation of the sustainable tourism strategy and in return get the right to usethe PAN Parks logo in their marketing.

Wide Consultation and Field-TestingFor PAN Parks to be successful, input from stakeholders and experts is crucial. Theprocess of developing P&C and the verification system has been open to all interestedparties.

The process of developing P&C started in late 1998. Since then around 50 experts/organizations representing different fields of eco-tourism (NGOs, science, parkmanagement, government bodies and consultants) have contributed to thestandard development process.

Between January and March 2000, the P&C was field-tested on 21 protectedareas in 18 European countries. This is the best way to turn the initiative into anoperational programme. Field-testing provided a reality check and importantfeedback for the team developing the final set of PAN Parks P&C. At the sametime, it allowed the participating parks to analyse and compare their strengthsand weaknesses to other European protected areas independently. It is vital thatpark managers join the future PAN Parks network.

Star-rating systemPAN Parks stand in the first place for well-protected ecosystems that guarantee a highquality, nature-based tourist experience. However, in addition to these “star parks”there are a number of candidate protected areas that are eager to participate, butwhich probably do not meet all strict P&C. This means that the net positive effect, orvalue added to European nature may remain limited.

The solution will be a "star rating system". Parks that do meet the strict selectioncriteria can become candidate members. They must give a sound guarantee that theywill develop a strategy within a strict time limit to fulfil the first set of criteria.

From the nature conservation point of view this would mean a very important result,and in fact we can use tourism development as a lever to create this kind of benefit fornature: expansion of the area and improving the management performance.

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PAN Parks organization establishedAt present many organizations and individuals play a role in the PAN Parksinitiative. WWF is still the driving force behind the project, but is distinct from PANParks. The recently launched PAN Parks logo will be owned by the European PANParks Management Organization.

The PAN Parks supervisory board sets the overall policy for the organization. Theyconsult the advisory board on all policy decisions. The supervisory board forexample approves PAN Parks P&C for protected areas and commercial partners, andin that way control the use of the PAN Parks logo. They also accredit independentorganizations, whose task is to carry out verification of potential PAN Parks on theground.

The PAN Parks management organization has an executive role. Their tasks includefundraising for the PAN Parks network, communication of the project andcooperation with protected areas.

PAN Parks will also have a local presence. Protected area managers and localinterest groups are encouraged to establish Executive PAN Parks Organizations(EPPOs), which in collaboration with the Pan Parks management organization,develop and implement sustainable tourism development strategies.

FundingManagement improvement is only possible if there are resources available. The roleof the PAN Parks organization is a facilitating one, providing the candidate memberswith effective support, in the form of consultancy and training, but also assisting insoliciting funds, subsidies and donations.The PAN Parks wish is to strengthen and diversify the financial basis ofprotected areas. We hope that PAN Parks will attract governments and the EUto channel more money into protected areas and their management in the future. The main challenge is to get the private sector on board to finance protectedareas on a large scale. PAN Parks logo holders will pay a proportion of theirrevenues to protected areas. The PAN Fund is being established and is intendedto attract capital from private investors and banks.

Challenge for tourism industry and conservation organizationsThis initiative is, we believe, one of the most exciting and radical ideas for thetourism industry and conservation organizations. In our view PAN Parks’ uniqueselling point is that it creates synergies between all actors and partners and enablesthem to reach goals that fit their mission, but which they cannot reach on their own.

Our shared vision is no less than to create the “Yellowstones” of Europe. We believethis is possible. As an example, the Abruzzo National Park in Italy is creating jobs.Levels of employment there are higher than, and comparable with, any NationalPark. The villages are lively places and the villagers are finding jobs in the local

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tourist industry. They are well aware that visitors are only there for the NationalPark. We would like to see more Abruzzos in Europe, branded under the PAN Parksseal of approval.

ReferencesCouncil of Europe, 1994. Recommendation No. R (94) 7 On a general policy forsustainable and environment-friendly tourism development.

Council of Europe, 1995. Recommendation No R (95) 10 On a sustainable touristdevelopment policy in protected areas.

Council of Europe, 1998. Regulations for the European Diploma of Protected Areas.

EuroParc Federation, 1993 Loving them to death? Sustainable tourism in Europe’sNature and National Parks.

Europarc Federation/FFPNR, 1999. European Charter for sustainable tourism inprotected areas

Eurosite, 1996. Site Conservation Assessments for protected and managed naturaland semi-natural areas.

Finnish Forest and Park Service, 1998. Management Principles for Protected Areas,draft.

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