Protected areas are not always successful in conserving biodiversity. Unsustainable resource extraction and illegal activities inside protected areas often occur. Can factors that make protected areas vulnerable be identified and best management strategies found?
Studies addressing these questions should be of interest to conservation biologists. According to Walker the importance of law enforcement and monitoring in the successful management of protected areas has been underscored throughout the conservation literature, even if many empirical studies have found them to be strongly correlated with resource condition. Walker addresses these questions with a law-enforcement and monitoring game-theory model from the political science and commons literature. The three key factors evaluated are:
- cost of monitoring rule breakers
- benefit of catching a rule breaker
- probability of catching a rule breaker
Assigning these variables realistic values proved to be difficult but even with crude values the variables had a remarkably strong predictive power and agreed surprisingly well with the reported outcomes in 116 protected areas from the peer-reviewed literature. The main finding was that conservation is unlikely to succeed if the cost of monitoring were greater than the product of the probability to catch a rule breaker and the benefit of doing so. Surprisingly, for me, was that the variables driving the monitor’s decision are those that most often determine the outcome because the resource users make their decisions according to what they think the monitors will do. So, by using either carrot or stick strategies to punish or motivate resource users little will be achieved in terms of stopping illegal use. This is valuable to keep in mind.
I think many of us felt the paper was a bit heavy to read because we were not familiar with the methodology or the terminology. The structure of first presenting the model in depth and then using it to predict case study outcomes can be confusing but for my part I really appreciated that so much space was given to explain the theoretical model in depth. It was also interesting how very different terminology political scientists and conservation biologist are using and this might in some respect mirror how we value things (e.g. the paper consistently talked about “resources” instead of for example “biodiversity features” etc.).
One concern we had with the paper was that it only considered top-down managed protected areas (which in a way was useful for us doing conservation because most national parks and reserves fall under this category even though other forms of management exist). Of course, everything cannot be covered in just one publication and the topic was clearly defined from the beginning. Related to this it would also have been interesting to hear more about the outcomes (in F&G) when transferring monitoring to the community, the so-called “pass the buck” strategy.
We also discussed if the reality is this black and white? And somehow this lead us to consider the problems we have even in Finland with illegal poaching of wolves and how this, according to the predictions of the paper, should be solved.
Conclusion: We agree that conservation biologists should be more aware of the work done by political scientists to solve monitoring dilemmas. In fact, we were so inspired by this new angle of approach that we decided to read some more of the references by Ostrom and others (we also recollected that we touched upon this subject already in November 2009 when reading about socio-ecological systems, see previous contribution by Heini).
Link to the paper:
Walker, K. L. 2009. Protected-Area Monitoring Dilemmas: a New Tool to Assess Success. Conservation Biology 23: 1294-1303.
doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01203.x