Understanding Power in Indigenous Protected Areas: the Case of the Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Parks

This article draws on concepts of power from political ecology and political sociology to describe the ways that the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation (a Canadian indigenous people) have attempted to realize their goals under the broad rubric of their Tribal Parks initiative. Like some other Indigenous peoples’ and Community Conserved territories and Areas (ICCAs), the Tribal Parks example features de facto legal pluralism, lack of clear tenure and/or legal recognition, oppositional and/or cooperative relationships with other actors, and situations where local actors are influenced by intersecting global discourses on conservation and indigenous rights and culture. Globally, ICCAs are a form of protected area and are potentially critical in terms of meeting ambitious global protected area targets as well in addressing issues related to the rights and well-being of indigenous peoples. As such, understanding the ‘customary law or other effective means’, or the dynamics of power through which indigenous groups are able (or not) to realize their protected area goals is of global significance. This article illuminates the contours of power through two specific Tribal Parks case studies: the first involves contestations over industrial logging, while the second focuses on the establishment and implementation of what came to be called an ‘ecosystem services fee’ paid by ecotourism outfitters operating within a Tribal Park. Results highlight that the Tla-o-qui-aht have drawn power from different sources and exercised it by different means including turning to the Courts in a context of legal uncertainty, protest and direct action coupled with appeals to public opinion, developing and drawing on relationships with both local and non-local interests, and by strategically ‘tapping into’ prominent discourses.     

“We Want Our Children to Grow Up to See These Animals:” Values and Protected Areas Governance in Canada, Ghana and Tanzania

Environmental governance research has paid insufficient attention to scholarship on values even though environmental values is a well-studied field. This paper begins to unpack the relationship between values and governance with a particular focus on protected areas governance and in light of ideas such as the distinction between held values and assigned values. We report on research from four case studies in Canada, Ghana and Tanzania, each of which investigated the values, interests and objectives of people in a rural community and ways in which these are reflected, or not, in governance arrangements for an adjacent protected area. Despite very diverse contexts, two held values that were encountered in each of the four case studies could be described as responsibility toward future generations and respect for and appreciation of nature. The existence of what may be universal values does not negate the importance of culture and place: similar held values are translated, through the particular circumstances of different individuals, communities and cultures, into a diversity of assigned values, interests and positions. The attention that governance processes have given to local people’s fundamental held values in three of the cases, and the ignoring of such values in the fourth, have had important implications for the relationship between community members and the adjacent protected area. We argue that systems for governance would do well to explicitly engage with values by supporting local articulation of values and by facilitating dialogue and deliberation amongst diverse stakeholders around their values.     

Conservation effectiveness of protected areas for Hong Kong butterflies declines under climate change

Protected areas are important in conserving the rapid decline of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Yet uncertainty persists whether protected areas will continue to meet conservation goals if climate change causes community or ecosystem shifts. Previous research has proven equivocal with some studies finding protected areas fail conservation objectives and others finding objectives are largely met. The effectiveness of protected area systems within tropical Asia and for insects are particularly under-studied. Using species distribution modeling of 68 butterfly species (15,346 locality records), we carried out an evaluation of the effectiveness of protected areas in Hong Kong, one of the most well-covered (40% land area) protected area systems in the Asian tropics, and projected how the ability to protect biodiversity would change under different climate change scenarios and different conservation target schemes. Under climate change, 15–37% of the modeled species in 2000 were projected to become extirpated by 2050. Under all conservation target schemes, the proportion of species unprotected increased or leveled, by up to as much as 7%. If buffer grids were considered as unprotected, the increase in these gap species was much greater, by up to as much as 22%. These results together indicate that under climate change, the effectiveness of protected areas for butterflies in Hong Kong is likely to decrease despite the territory’s relatively high proportion of protected area coverage. We also highlight here the importance of the fortification of partly protected areas in mediating biodiversity loss under the impacts of global change.     

Limitations of Protected Areas Zoning in Mediterranean Cultural Landscapes Under the Ecosystem Services Approach

Protected areas have been created worldwide to set apart certain areas from land-use transformation. The biodiversity and ecosystems protected by these areas deliver several ecosystem services. Recently, besides increasing global protected coverage, there has been a growing demand to assess the adequacy of protected areas management. In this study, we assessed how the management of protected areas can deal with ecosystem services taking as example the Doñana and Sierra Nevada protected areas (Spain). For that aim we analyzed the protected area management plans, mapped seven ecosystem services, and assessed how they are affected by protected area zoning and land-use intensity. We found that although provisioning and cultural services are included in the management plans of the protected areas under a different terminology, regulating services are barely addressed. Ecosystem service delivery varies depending on several factors including the protection category of the protected areas (protection intensity), land-use intensity and geomorphological factors, among others. Therefore, we discuss that integrating ecosystem services in protected area management requires dealing with complexity, necessitating the establishment of specific goals for ecosystem service delivery, which include ecosystem service synergies and trade-offs.     

Measuring the difference made by conservation initiatives: protected areas and their environmental and social impacts

Success in conservation depends on our ability to reduce human pressures in areas that harbour biological diversity and ecosystem services. Legally protecting some of these areas through the creation of protected areas is a key component of conservation efforts globally. To develop effective protected area networks, practitioners need credible, scientific evidence about the degree to which protected areas affect environmental and social outcomes, and how these effects vary with context. Such evidence has been lacking, but the situation is changing as conservation scientists adopt more sophisticated research designs for evaluating protected areas'' past impacts and for predicting their future impacts. Complementing these scientific advances, conservation funders and practitioners are paying increasing attention to evaluating their investments with more scientifically rigorous evaluation designs. This theme issue highlights recent advances in the science of protected area evaluations and explores the challenges to developing a more credible evidence base that can help societies achieve their goals of protecting nature while enhancing human welfare.     

Arable acronyms analysed – a review of integrated arable farming systems research in Western Europe

Arable production has come under increasing economic and environmental pressures, especially in the last decade. These have derived from over-production, decreased farm incomes and a concern with the possible environmental effects of intensive pesticide use associated with such intensive cultivation. A number of long-term research programmes on integrated farming systems and their sustainability have recently been completed or are currently under way. In the UK, these include the ‘Boxworth’ project, ‘SCARAB’, TALISMAN’, RISC, ‘LINK Integrated Farming Systems’, ‘LIFE’ and the demonstration-only programme ‘LEAF’. These projects are reviewed in terms of their objectives, designs and results to date, and are compared with some parallel programmes in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and France.     

Three challenges for a real people-centred conservation

Many commentators attest to a paradigm shift in biodiversity conservation, away from exclusive protected areas towards more people‐centred or community‐based conservation. This has been referred to as ‘new conservation’. However, new conservation could be thought of as an attempt to re‐label and re‐package conservation and to ‘get people on board’ existing strategies. According to its critics even so‐called new conservation policy, practice and institutions remain expert‐driven, undemocratic and autocratic. I argue that for new conservation to become reality, then more fundamental changes in priority‐setting, decision‐making and organization are required. This paper presents three challenges for a real people‐centred conservation: a more pluralist approach to understanding knowledge and values of different actors, greater deliberation and inclusion in decision‐making, and a remodelling of institutions to support conservation.     

Ecological,economic and social perspectives on cocoa production worldwide

Cocoa is a crop grown largely by smallholder farmers in the lowland tropics, including parts of Latin America, West Africa, and Indonesia. Research suggests that it has the potential to provide biodiversity benefits when grown under certain shade conditions, especially when compared with alternative land uses. The primary literature on cocoa production reveals a range of objectives for improvement of cocoa production on small farms. These objectives are sometimes in direct opposition to each other, for example, increasing productivity through shade removal and chemical inputs, and the desire to increase biodiversity benefits. These opposing goals demonstrate some real trade-offs faced by cocoa producers. We summarize the current literature, drawing attention to some of these trade-offs and highlighting important ecological, economic, and social considerations. In considering strategies for ameliorating these negative tradeoffs, we make two primary policy recommendations. First, we suggest that outreach focusing on farm diversification may be the most effective way of optimizing ecological, economic, and social outcomes. Farm diversification may provide an effective means of achieving improved farmer security and dissuade farmers from abandoning or planting cocoa according to price fluctuations, thus reducing the use of new forest areas in cocoa production. Secondly, we suggest greater focus on determining effective economic incentives for maintaining shade in cocoa production. For example, price premiums associated high quality shade-grown cocoa may increase economic benefits while simultaneously providing incentives to farmers to maintain shade in production. Lastly, we identify some important areas of research for further informing policy in this arena.     

Reviewing Biosphere Reserves globally: effective conservation action or bureaucratic label?

The Biosphere Reserve (BR) model of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme reflects a shift towards more accountable conservation. Biosphere Reserves attempt to reconcile environmental protection with sustainable development; they explicitly acknowledge humans, and human interests in the conservation landscape while still maintaining the ecological values of existing protected areas. Conceptually, this model is attractive, with 610 sites currently designated globally. Yet the practical reality of implementing dual ‘conservation’ and ‘development’ goals is challenging, with few examples successfully conforming to the model's full criteria. Here, we review the history of Biosphere Reserves from first inception in 1974 to the current status quo, and examine the suitability of the designation as an effective conservation model. We track the spatial expansion of Biosphere Reserves globally, assessing the influence of the Statutory Framework of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves and Seville strategy in 1995, when the BR concept refocused its core objectives on sustainable development. We use a comprehensive range of case studies to discuss conformity to the Programme, the social and ecological consequences associated with implementation of the designation, and challenges in aligning conservation and development. Given that the ‘Biosphere Reserve’ label is a relatively unknown designation in the public arena, this review also provides details on popularising the Biosphere Reserve brand, as well as prospects for further research, currently unexploited, but implicit in the designation.     

The rise of planning in nature conservation and the practitioners’ approach to conflicts. The inspiring case of the Northern French Alps nature reserves

This article examines how the rise of planning in conservation influences the conservation practitioners’ approach to conflicts in a region where protected areas have limited power. It is based on an analysis of the management plans of ten nature reserves of the Northern French Alps, complemented with interviews with the practitioners involved in elaborating these plans. It shows that the collaborative paradigm, predicated on the idea that deliberation between parties can lead to a shared understanding of the common good, has pervaded conservation planning. Collaborative planning enriches the planners’ view of the practices and values at work in the reserves. But it also encourages them to develop conflict avoiding strategies that contribute to maintaining existing power imbalances, which in such regions are often detrimental to conservation goals. Analysing the power relationships at play locally, encouraging the planners’ reflexivity, and increasing their agency would help realize the transformative potential of contentious situations.     

Making parks make a difference: poor alignment of policy,planning and management with protected-area impact,and ways forward

Policy and practice around protected areas are poorly aligned with the basic purpose of protection, which is to make a difference. The difference made by protected areas is their impact, defined in program evaluation as the outcomes arising from protection relative to the counterfactual of no protection or a different form of protection. Although impact evaluation of programs is well established in fields such as medicine, education and development aid, it is rare in nature conservation. We show that the present weak alignment with impact of policy targets and operational objectives for protected areas involves a great risk: targets and objectives can be achieved while making little difference to the conservation of biodiversity. We also review potential ways of increasing the difference made by protected areas, finding a poor evidence base for the use of planning and management ‘levers’ to better achieve impact. We propose a dual strategy for making protected areas more effective in their basic role of saving nature, outlining ways of developing targets and objectives focused on impact while also improving the evidence for effective planning and management.     

What should be evaluated from a manager's perspective? Developing a salient protected area effectiveness evaluation system for managers and scientists in Spain

The System for the Integrated Assessment of Protected Areas (SIAPA) was developed as a tool to improve our knowledge on the status and trends of protected biodiversity. In order to increase SIAPA's salience and use, representatives of the main managerial and scientific protected area (PA) institutions of Spain were surveyed using a structured questionnaire. PA network managers and scientists showed a high degree of consistency in rating the most important SIAPA indicators: ‘Appropriateness of protection legislation’, ‘Degree of fulfilment of management objectives’ and ‘Effectiveness of public participation bodies’, respectively. However, PA managers perceived the ‘State of conservation’ as the most determinant factor to ascertain overall PA effectiveness whereas for scientists ‘Management’ was the most important factor. Most managers and one scientist suggested including the indicator ‘Change in extent of focal habitats’ in the SIAPA and comparing management effects inside and outside PAs. The methods and results of this study intend to streamline and standardise PA evaluation efforts in Spain and guide future developments of PA evaluation systems elsewhere.     

Understanding the interacting factors that determine ecological effectiveness of terrestrial protected areas

Protected areas are recognized as an essential tool to safeguard habitat integrity and biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Substantial efforts have been made to clarify the conditions under which they deliver conservation outcomes effectively. Location, spatial design, management strategy and threats, have commonly been identified as key factors. The impacts of these factors have, however, often been evaluated independently, and there is limited information on how their combined and interactive effects can improve or hinder protected area effectiveness. Here we develop a framework for understanding the combined effects of these factors. This has important implications for how protected areas are established and maintained.     

Future Scenarios as a Research Tool: Investigating Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation Options and Outcomes for the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Climate change is a significant future driver of change in coastal social-ecological systems. Our knowledge of impacts, adaptation options, and possible outcomes for marine environments and coastal industries is expanding, but remains limited and uncertain. Alternative scenarios are a way to explore potential futures under a range of conditions. We developed four alternative future scenarios for the Great Barrier Reef and its fishing and tourism industries positing moderate and more extreme (2–3 °C above pre-industrial temperatures) warming for 2050 and contrasting ‘limited’ and ‘ideal’ ecological and social adaptation. We presented these scenarios to representatives of key stakeholder groups to assess the perceived viability of different social adaptation options to deliver desirable outcomes under varied contexts.     

An ontological crisis? A review of large felid conservation in India

The need for a solid knowledge base to inform conservation activity is now universally recognised. We critically scrutinised the scientific knowledge of large felids in India located in peer-reviewed research papers to assess the information available to make landscape-level management decisions that aid conservation, which is a stated goal of both the Indian government and the international community. We found two striking patterns: the biological sciences dominate in the published literature, and nearly all the research has been carried out in protected areas, though a substantial number of large felids also live outside protected areas. We argue that these patterns are not incidental, but the result of the dualistic ontology of science that uses processes of ‘purification’ and ‘translation’ to fit complex realities into disciplinary prerogatives organised around creating dichotomies (like nature–culture). In addition, since this body of scientific knowledge locates large felids in ‘pure’ biological landscapes, there is little or no insight from multi-use landscapes. These findings, we believe, highlight important knowledge gaps in our present research-based knowledge of large felids in India, which urgently need to be addressed if progress is to be made in conservation.     

Primitivist tourism and anthropological research: awkward relations★

Many anthropologists dislike the tourism depicted in the film Cannibal tours (1988), which values visited people for their supposed embodiment of an archaic mode of life, isolated from capitalist modernity. Here I approach such tourism through how its participants relate to anthropology, based on research into encounters between tourists and Korowai of Indonesian Papua. I juxtapose three patterns. First, Korowai sometimes assimilate me to ‘tourist’ or ‘tour guide’. Second, tourists often embrace ‘anthropology’ as an adjunct to their primitivist goals. Third, certain tourists investigate their own primitivism, in ways that parallel my research on that topic. This diversity of alignments of tourist, anthropologist, and Korowai calls for an analytic strategy not of seeking out the ultimate basic relations between these character-types, but of understanding categorization as a practice of its own, through which categorizers grapple with broader historical conditions.     

Governance options for science–policy interfaces on biodiversity and ecosystem services: comparing a network versus a platform approach

Science–policy-interfaces (SPIs) are expected to go beyond the linear model of scientific policy advice through creating spaces for exchange and dialogue between ‘policy’ and ‘knowledge’. Given that most environmental issues require inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, SPIs must take into account a variety of knowledge types, views and interests of scientists, policymakers and other decision makers. Moreover, acceptance and durability of SPIs depend largely on their perceived legitimacy and the credibility of their knowledge-gathering processes, providing additional challenges for their internal organisation. As the interplay between different knowledge types and decision making is far from neutral, a reflexive approach is required in the design of an SPI so that it is capable of learning from past experiences. The aim of this article is to discuss which governance arrangements could best support the development of an effective and legitimate SPI for European biodiversity politics. We analyse different options for facilitating the implementation of a ‘Network of Knowledge’ approach. This approach has been developed to improve the interface between diverse knowledge-holder communities and decision making processes for biodiversity and ecosystem services—a field where multi-scalar and multi-dimensional problems arise. In this article, we develop and discuss two stylized extreme governance models as our starting point: an `informal network model´, which almost entirely depends on the dedication of individuals, versus a more formalized `platform model´, predominantly based on the needs and interests of the organisations involved. We discuss the pros and cons of each of these models in reaching their objectives and in developing sound governing processes for a ‘Network of Knowledge’. From this discussion, we derive a recommended design for the reflexive governance of such a network in the context of the European Union and finish by discussing some more general lessons learnt.     

Responsibilization dynamics in naṭural resource management: Insights from two protected areas in Cameroon

The theoretical construct on responsiblization is gaining grounds as a novel analytical lens in the field of governmentality – an approach to the study of strategies for shaping people’s conduct and decisions in line with specific objectives. However, not enough scientific evidence exists on the mechanisms through which protected area communities are rendered responsible by international conservation agencies, and the (un)intended outcomes linked to this process. Through a synthesis of 14 project intervention reports in two Protected Areas (PAs) in Cameroon – the Bakossi National Park (BNP) and the Campo Ma’an National Park (CMNP), complemented by expert interviews (N = 10), this paper: (i) explores the mechanisms employed by conservation responsibilizers in the two PAs, and (ii) examines the (un)intended protected area management outcomes. The thematic and directed content analysis led us to three key findings: Firstly, while interventions in the CMNP are embedded in the ecotourism development model, the case of the BNP centres on the Green Business and Sustainable Oil Palm Production models. This validates the claim that responsibilization and targeted interventions are intertwined and discursively constructed to shape the conduct of local people towards specific goals. Secondly, responsibilization in both cases manifest through poor institutionalization and fragmented capacity building interventions; this undermines the importance of responsive governance. Third, both cases established the incongruence between the capabilities of responsibilizees and the targets set by responsibilizers. This paper provides context-specific evidence to edify the on-going theoretical construct on responsiblization and underscores the need for studies to identify pathways to overcome the capacity gaps of responsibilizees. Policy wise, there is an urgent need to defragment the interventions by responsibilizers to assure long-term strategic interventions.