Dearden et al. report on the findings from a global survey to assess changes in governance of protected area systems between 1992 and 2002. The study was a contribution towards the governance sessions at the Vth World Parks Congress in Durban 2003. The survey was distributed to over 110 national PA agencies throughout the world and resulted in 51 responses from 41 countries. The countries were grouped according to their high, medium or low human development.

Dearden et al. draw the following main conclusions:
between the years 1992 and 2002 there seem to have been increased participation of different stakeholders and greater use of formal accountability mechanisms, and also a wider range of participatory techniques. Almost 90 % of respondents felt that protected area governance had improved over the last decade and 67 % felt that this had also improved management effectiveness.

It would have been interesting to see the structure of the questionnaire and how the questions were framed. We would clearly also have been interested in knowing which specific countries that were included. In the Discussion-section the authors explain that originally they had also planned to survey national-level NGOs in each country to get an idea of their views on governance and PA management trends and then compare this to the answers by managers. This would indeed have been interesting and it’s a pity it could not be done. As the study was now designed we fear that managers might have had personal interests in rating changes as more positive that maybe was the case. Answering for the situation in both 1992 and 2002 at the same survey and at the same time is not very likely to reflect real changes. Personnel might have changed during this time and the researchers have no way of knowing whether the person answering the survey knows anything about the previous situation a decade ago. Moreover, it seems the surveys were sent to some protected area central office and even individual PA mangers might be surprised at the answers given on behalf of their PAs. Moreover, the vocabulary and terminology have also changed quite a lot during these years and might therefore not have been the same in 1992.

Another thing is that Dearden et al. seemed very eager to report on the greater speed of change and more progressive initiatives taken in the developing countries to improve governance. They do not mention much about the absolute situations in the two groups and just pinpointing change might not tell very much. We discussed for example the issue of stakeholder involvement which is a complicated issue. We think it is problematic to just assume it would always be good under all circumstances. Assessing outcomes in governance is therefore a bit problematic, if not biodiversity objectives are considered. Some of these concerns are addressed in the end of the paper.

Link to the paper:

Dearden, P., Bennett, M., Johnston, J. 2005. Trends in Global Protected Area Governance, 1992-2002. Environmental Management 36: 89-100.

doi: 10.1007/s00267-004-0131-9