The Third Wave of Protected Area Planning

Over the last couple of weeks I have built a case for rethinking the way planning for protected areas moves forward. In those weeks, I suggested that not only are protected areas confronted with the hurricane like forces of global change but also that planners and managers are ill-prepared to deal with them. I noted that our current dominant paradigm of planning, based on rational-comprehensive planning, is both inadequate and inappropriate in this environment. I mentioned that in two previous “waves” of planning, certain assumptions about the character of the world dominated, but now a new and third wave of planning is required with a different set of assumptions.


In the Third Wave of protected area planning, planners assume the world to be significantly different: it is one that is dynamic, impossible to completely understand, complex, and ever-changing. These characteristics mean that the challenges confronting protected areas are messy more than they are tame. In these situations, planning serves as a means of communication, linking governance and management systems, transferring and translating societal preferences to managers and providing feedback to governance as to the experience of management (Nkhata and McCool, in press). These authors argue that planning facilitates

“… development of social competencies needed to adapt to the complex, ever-changing and uncertain conditions of protected areas. It does this by providing a mid-scale process that affords venues for transmitting and interpreting information developed at the governance level to the management level. Such a process identifies the various interests the public holds in a protected area, the trade-offs involved in managing for those values, and the actions needed to protect desired values and futures. In so doing, planning establishes direction and provides for the creation of the shared understandings required for responding to societal demands.”

In the world of the 21st century, the basic aim of planning remains the same as it has always been—changing the future. However, beyond that, the Third Wave of protected area planning is not simply the application of knowledge, the production of a plan, or an assessment of threats, risks and opportunities confronting protected areas. Planning in an age of turbulence requires integration of four fundamental tasks in order to maintain this original aim.

Building Technical Proficiencies

Conventional planning for protected areas has often been conducted by consultants or specialized planning bureaucracies within an organization. In this approach to planning, experts arrive on a planning scene, conduct their analyses, write a plan, send it off and receive a paycheck. In many cases, there is little interaction with protected area staff. These plans tend to be grandiose, comprehensive and expensive. They frequently assume the organization holds the legal, financial and technical capacity to implement them. They largely ignore the complex set of forces that stress protected areas. Plans developed in central bureaus and by consultants play lip service to the notion of community engagement, managerial participation, and implementation.

As a result, managers not only have little ownership in the plan, they probably also hold a barely modest understanding of how the plan was developed, why it contains the actions it does, and less even of how it should be implemented. The overwhelming result is that plans sit on the shelf, managers are frustrated as well as lacking the technical proficiencies and confidence needed for implementation, affected publics are disappointed and the agency or its donor is poorer. Compartmentalization of planning and management builds divides that cannot easily be bridged.

At the same time, the lack of technical proficiencies in protected area management is generally recognized as a significant obstacle to biodiversity protection and to providing high quality opportunities for visitor experiences . Planning can be viewed as an exercise in developing expertise through carefully crafted processes where competent planners and consultants play the roles of coach and facilitator. By involving managers and staff directly in the process, technical competencies are built, learning occurs, ownership is created and a more realistic, if modest, plan is developed and implemented.

Constructing Public Interests

Protected area managers have responsibilities to ensure that the public interests in protected areas are sustained; however, constructing such interests in contentious, complex settings often require negotiation among multiple voices expressing goals that are simultaneously both shared and conflicting. Conflicting goals are not only characteristic of many protected area planning situations, but also form the core of the arguments about constructing management that sustains the values, services and benefits for which these areas were designated.

At one level, it would seem that resolving conflicts in goals requires simply identifying and clarifying the public interest in protected areas. Although the language contained in the legislation or administrative decree establishing the protected area offers clues to this interest, its suitability for providing guidance to management is limited by two factors. First, such language typically is vague and abstract, lacking detail and explicit definition about the conditions deemed appropriate or the values protected in the area. For example, the U.S. National Park Act of 1916 requires national parks to be administered in part for the “benefit of future generations”. What specific benefits to be secured for which generations are questions that are not addressed in this legislation, and thus left for site managers to resolve. But managerial resolution alone privileges expertise and disciplinary biases and perspectives at the cost of other viewpoints and value systems which may be more consistent with the notions behind the legislation.

Second, the idea that such legislative language provides insight into the public interest is flawed because there is no single, unitary voice in societies that are as pluralistic as those of today (Pierce, Steger, Steel, & Lovrich, 1992; Rothman, 1979; Schubert, 1960). Management is left with the question of determining which voice represents the authoritative directive. Indeed, such legislative language itself often represents the results of societal deliberation and a compromise among competing interests. In reality, the “public interest” is a transitory phenomenon, shifting in response to changes in the power and importance of contending interests (Schubert, 1960). In other words, there is no single public interest; this proposition thus requires a search for planning direction driven by the need to frame a working approximation of consensus not only among plural interests, but among multiple, often dissenting, scientific perspectives as well.

Planning can then be viewed as a process of identifying and constructing the public interests in a particular protected area. Such processes, to be truly legitimate, credible and useful, must then involve a variety of publics working in partnership (McCool 2009) to explicate interests, find common grounds and address their incompatibilities. Often it is said that competing interests must be balanced—as in balancing the local and national interests, balancing conservation and development, and so on. However, in my judgment what is required is integration of interests rather than balancing. Balancing assumes that interests are competing, conflicting and incompatible.

Integrating interests means finding ways to accommodate each interest—as long as it is legitimate under the area’s organic legislation—in some way. In many cases, this may require identifying primary and secondary objectives, compromising on one to a point, then compromising on another. This process is at the heart of the Limits of Acceptable Change process which is used in many protected areas to manage visitor use.

Focus on Learning

For protected areas embedded in complex, dynamic and contentious situations, cause-effect relationships are typified by temporal and spatial discontinuities, and linkages frequently demonstrate a probabilistic rather than a deterministic character. In these situations, the system is termed “loosely-coupled.” Tightly coupled systems are those with linkages that are highly time dependent and invariant in terms of sequences of actions (Perrow 1999). They lack capacity to tolerate delays and are rigidly structured in terms of how objectives are achieved. The social-ecological systems embedding protected areas tend to be of the former type: there are a variety of means of achieving objectives, there are often temporal delays between actions and consequences (such as, tourism promotion and increases in visitation), and sequences for actions are often unknown or make little difference in outcomes. In loosely coupled systems, relationships between causes and effects, for example, recreation-setting attributes and visitor experiences, are only probabilistic. That is, managers provide only the opportunity (through manipulation of settings) for visitors to experience certain outcomes; they do not determine what those outcomes will be. The delays and the second- and third-order effects make understanding system processes and implementing effective management actions difficult, simply because of the complex relationships existing between causes and effects. Thus, loosely coupled systems are not only difficult to understand, but challenging to manage.

Normally, learning is characterized as understanding links between causes and effects, evaluating them and responding accordingly. Because protected area planning is a “messy” problem, the mental models (Senge 1990) used to organize learning and behavior in the real world not only have to change, but must remain adaptive in response to social change and new knowledge.

As Argyris and Schon (1978) argue, there are two results here: (1) the linkages between causes and effects can be confirmed and/or (2) there are unintended consequences (surprises). . To Argyris and Schon (1978), learning involves the “detection and correction of error”, normally understood as making connections between actions and their consequences. However, because of the loosely coupled character of protected areas this “single-loop” learning is not adequate. Argyris (1976) contends that learning must be “double-looped”, focused not only on understanding cause-effect relationships but also the variables that govern the operation of the system:

Double-loop learning occurs when error is detected and corrected in ways that involve the modification of an organization’s underlying norms, policies and objectives.

Single-loop learning is acceptable and appropriate in situations where there is agreement on goals and policies, but where disagreement or uncertainty exists, planning must focus on understanding how the larger system functions. Creating an environment for encouraging double-loop learning then becomes an enormous challenge, but can be facilitated by sharing control of learning processes and by participation in design and implementation of actions (Argyris1976).

Moreover, learning has a strategic dimension: anticipating alternative futures and building strategies to deal with them. An important approach in dealing with the messy situations confronting protected area managers is to think about possible future scenarios and develop strategies that will facilitate achieving goals across scenarios.

While protected area organizations incorporate new biological knowledge into management plans (e.g., U.S. Forest Service moving from fire suppression to fire management once it was understood that fire was a natural process in western U.S. situations), they typically have had more difficulty in sensing and responding to changes in the social and political environment. In the past, this occurred because systems thinking has progressed further in the biophysical domain than it has in the social domain

Without learning, organizations are unable to effectively anticipate and respond to the changing demands expressed by development of new constituencies and emerging alliances with varying preferences. These environments require management strategies focused on learning.

Application of knowledge

Managers and planners bring to a planning situation their technical and procedural expertise. Scientists contribute specialized knowledge about ecological or sociological processes and conditions, the effects of management actions, and the presence of unique or valuable species or values. Members of the public demand that socially important questions be addressed, force higher quality research, and provide emotional, anecdotal, and political knowledge that defines the acceptable decision space. These forms of knowledge, both formal and informal, are all need to address protected area issues, for as Freidmann (1973) acknowledged action in society requires multiple actors in a variety of roles.

The deliberation that results from the integration of different forms of knowledge and perspectives leads to an enhanced understanding of the protected area system. The dialogue resulting from the intersection of multiple forms of knowledge forms the basis for the learning mentioned earlier and eventually a consensus on a way forward. Learning in the context of planning thus is a complex endeavor itself and requires attention to secure it. This learning is based on dialogue among the diverse interests and perspectives involved, and thus at a more operational level, venues and agendas need to be designed to encourage dialogue and active involvement in learning (Walker and Daniels 1996).

Because in messy situations goals are in conflict, competing, or ambiguous, knowledge cannot be applied to change the future. Planning must then be focused on building a consensus about how to apply knowledge in implementing an appropriate direction. By consensus, I mean a grudging agreement exists among constituencies, a willingness to accept a plan of action even if there is not a preference for it. Building consensus is a fundamental condition to mobilizing societal resources to protect values or secure goals of public interest. In addition, since there is considerable uncertainty in cause-effect relationships, partnerships must be focused on creating venues that encourage dialogue and learning.

Next week, I will talk about some ways forward to reach this new third wave of planning.