The 2014 World Parks Congress: Some Lessons Learned about Tourism and Protected Areas

I recently participated in the World Parks Congress held in Sydney Australia, 12-19 November. Organized every 10-11 years (last in Durbin South Africa in 2003), the Congress is sponsored by IUCN to convene managers, scientists, community development specialists and artists in an 8 day dialogue about the role of protected areas such as national parks, wilderness, national forests and community conserved areas in preserving the world’s remaining biodiversity and natural heritage. The 6000 participants engaged in hundreds of sessions, had their choice of what must have been thousands of individual presentations, engaged in renewing friendships and strengthening their common passion.

Tourism and visitors are a vital part of the natural heritage scene—indeed many of the world’s 200,000 plus protected areas were set aside for visitors to enjoy and appreciate the earth’s natural beauty—not only in gaining a better appreciation of natural heritage, but also their role in providing for and protecting human life. In this respect, protected areas are not an optional thing that societies do, but one that is essential to ensuring the future of the human species on this little place we call earth. In participating in a number of tourism related sessions and others dealing with the theme of “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” and “Inspiring a New Generation” I learned several lessons, not all of them positive.

Lesson 1. Young people are key to conserving natural heritage.

Nelson Mandela had advised the World Parks Congress in 2003 to engage young people in conserving parks, wildlife, water and the environment. A major stream of the 2014 Parks Congress focused on this charge. Indeed, the whole idea of sustainability is to leave options for those living in the future, and youth represent the near term future—but they need guidance and the wisdom experience provides. There are many ways to engage people in conservation and protected areas, but visiting them is probably the most effective way of engaging nature, viewing it, learning from it, appreciating its importance and eventually conserving it. This means more visits to protected areas, and the challenge not only for educators but managers as well is to provide opportunities for high quality experiences. To do this, we need managerial, informational and physical infrastructure. Competent managers are needed to ensure impacts from visitation do not lead to unacceptable degradation; information is needed to interpret and communicate the wonders of our natural heritage and how our life depends on it; and physical infrastructure is needed to sensitively access protected areas.

Lesson 2. Relationships between people and parks are changing; they are dynamic and that leads to some uncertainty.

Maintaining the relevancy of protected areas to society will remain a challenge because the meanings that society’s attach to them are always in a state of change. During the 2003 World Parks Congress, there was considerable discussion about the utilitarian benefits of protected areas, the ecosystem-based services that nature provides, in the language that was used. The emphasis in the 2014 conference built upon this arguing that protected areas just didn’t provide services but our natural heritage is essential to continuing human life on this planet. Protected areas have traditionally been seen as places in which to recreate, in the U.S., national parks, for example, were often viewed as “nature’s playgrounds.” While recreation will remain an important relationship, society is changing, valuing other benefits and meanings as well, such as places where “normal” people can learn about life and living on a small planet. The changing character of these relationships is not really predictable leading to the inevitable conclusion that managing agencies need to remain adaptive, employ sensing mechanisms to identify change, and creative in seeing new ways to connect to the people they serve.

Lesson 3. Communities must have ownership in conservation and protected areas.

At my first World Parks Congress, in 1992, there was considerable conflict between the indigenous and aboriginal peoples, primarily from the south, and activists of the north. The former tended to see protected areas as a cost to them, as when they were being gazetted, their access to resources needed for livelihoods was limited. In 2003, this conflict had changed to tension, principally as indigenous people argued that (1) they had for a long time practiced conservation, and (2) need to be engaged in conventional, versus traditional, authority designations of protected areas occuring on or near their ancestral lands. In 2014, indigenous and aboriginal peoples were fully supportive of protected areas in which they had not just been consulted with, but engaged in gazetting and management. The lesson for me is that people need this sense of ownership in the protected area to fully support it and work with managing agencies. This sense of ownership, which Paul Lachapelle and I wrote about nearly a decade ago, is critical to effective management, and yet we know little about how to build it, maintain it, and use it to further conservation goals. Of course, for many indigenous people, their sense of ownership is based on legal rights of access and use. Communities is where tourism development often happens. Communities that are not happy about protected areas or have little ownership in their management will find it difficult to develop high quality visitor opportunities.

Lesson 4. Capacity to manage protected areas is limited leading to ineffective management.

The World Parks Congress in 2014 finally began addressing building the capacity to manage protected areas effectively. According to the 2014 edition of the Protected Planet report (published by the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Center) only an estimated 29% of the world’s designated protected areas are effectively managed, a figure less than what I had expected. Building managerial competency is an important dimension of effective stewardship, which I have written about in previous blogs here (particularly most recently on Sept. 27, 2014). There was a crosscutting theme on Capacity Development at the Congress in which I participated. Among the competencies I have long argued that are needed are not just technical skills, but leadership and critical thinking, the types of dimensions to management that Peter Senge often writes about. In this respect, I focus principally on middle management, because in organizations that is the critical level at which policy is translated to action, and because ranger level capacity development is already the focus of much capacity development activity. And there are few opportunities for managers to develop those skills---for example the International Seminar on Protected Area Management (see my blog of Aug. 8, 2013). We need many such seminars to build capacity—why not have such seminars on every continent every year, and multiple copies of them? And, we need tertiary and continuing education programs as well, particularly in tourism and visitation management as this is where much of the problematic 

challenges arise.

Lesson 5. There is great demand among managers for information about managing tourism and visitation, but this demand receives little recognition from NGOs.

And speaking of competencies, tourism is likely the largest commercial use of protected areas, and many managers struggle with managing visitation and supervising concessions. And while many NGOs and government agencies see tourism as a way to finance management and turn to the private sector to provide opportunities, there is little information that synthesizes what we know. The Best Practice Guidelines on tourism in protected areas are among the most demanded Guidelines that IUCN publishes and yet many participants to the World Parks Congress were disappointed that tourism and visitor management were not included in the agenda as a major stream or crosscutting theme. Tourism and visitation are the means to better engage youth and others in conservation; living conservation and seeing what our natural heritage offers and how it supports human life is how we can effectively gain political support for conservation. But such engagement requires management, as I noted in Lesson 1 above. Turning tourism over to the private sector as a conduit for experiences may be appropriate in some situations, but that tourism still needs management and supervision. Managing tourism and visitation is not simple, as managers of such parks as Kruger National Park in South Africa, Yosemite in the US or Taishan in China can attest.

So, these are some lessons I learned from the Congress. Of course, there are many others that I observed, but in terms of managing tourism and visitation, this is what we need to address.

Communities, Tourism, Protected Areas and Visitor Experiences

High on the agenda of international conservation NGOs and government protected area agencies is enhancing the contribution of tourism to funding protected areas and their stewardship. This is important because (1) gaining political support for protected area stewardship requires that visitors have the opportunity to view, learn about and appreciate the natural heritage contained within them; and (2) visitation generates revenue and economic opportunity for people living in nearby communities who provide supporting services, everywhere from providing guiding and transportation to food, lodging and crafts and arts.

But good visitor experiences, which are at the heart of a successful tourism economy just don’t happen, they must be carefully constructed. This fact raises a number of important challenges and opportunities that I discuss in this special video. You can view the video by clicking on this link: http://youtu.be/C6AgQT4CqHY.

The Four Keys to Enhanced Protected Area Manager Performance

Recently, I participated in the Second Mobile Seminar on Sustainable Tourism and Protected Areas organized and sponsored by Colorado State University. The Seminar focused on the opportunities and challenges confronting protected area managers as they set to integrate two goals partly competing and partly overlapping: protecting the natural heritage at the foundation of the protected area and providing access to that heritage for visitors to view, enjoy and appreciate. This challenge is among the most significant facing management of protected areas globally as tourism and visitation are most likely the largest commercial use of these areas.

CSU had asked me to present about what challenges confronted managers as they sought to manage tourism and visitation. I have previously written about this challenge on the blog and had identified a set of professional competencies needed to address it. But meeting this challenge requires more than being competent, as I told the Seminar participants. Competently applying skills is only one component of enhanced managerial performance, particularly given an increased emphasis by conservation organizations on effective management of protected areas.

View the video that goes into a bit more detail: 

Here is how I see the four keys to enhanced performance and how we get there:

1.     Thinking critically – in the wicked and messy world of 21^st century protected area management, learning and thinking critically are paramount. As Jon Kohl and I argue in our soon to be released book, The Future has Other Plans, we can no longer argue or assume that the world is predictable, linear, understandable or stable. Rather it is dynamic, impossible to completely understand, complex and ever-changing. An ethic of daily learning is required to address the challenges—as well as the opportunities—we encounter daily in this environment. We need strong critical thinking skills to assess, evaluate and reflect upon the many proposals arriving on our desks. This means we need to be a bit of a skeptic, closely scrutinizing events, from global to local, to understand what they mean and their implications.

We build critical thinking skills through several pathways, most notably through tertiary education, but also through continuing education programs oriented toward creating understanding of why things occur, building frameworks to guide our thinking, and developing networks and communities of practice to test our ideas. Continuing education is generally the domain of universities and colleges because these institutions, while having handcuffs of their own, are not bound by particular agency policy and culture, are focused on uncovering truth, and often open our minds to ideas we do not see because of our organizational cultures.

2.      Acting Competently – we need managers that are proficient, that understand how things work, that drive and operate organizations in ways that are not only effective and efficient but equitable as well. Doing things right is important and this is probably the most valued attribute of managers and protected area staff. We need to build competency in protected area skill application just as we need our staff to think critically. We need managers who know how to design and implement interpretative programs, enforce rules and regulations, apply landscape level restoration, manage wildlife populations and administer concession contracts among other tasks.

Skill development is the domain of training—where staff understand what and how to do things, but not necessarily why they do these things. While universities often provide training, this is properly the domain of vocational programs and agency training centers, such as the U.S. Department of the Interior National Conservation Training Center. A university may not be the best place to learn the how to’s of law enforcement or how to design and implement a field data management program, but a training center or program would be.

3.     Deciding Confidently – managers must be able to make decisions that reflect themselves as self-assured and poised, that they feel good about having considered the alternatives and their consequences, that they have interacted with constituencies and staff about a preferred course of action, and that they have built monitoring and adaptive management protocols in the event their assumptions underlying the decision are proven questionable. There is often a fine line between being confident and being arrogant (say a feeling of being of superior intelligence or perception), so I mean here that decisions are made with a sense of humility.

Developing confidence requires mentoring—working jointly with more experienced and confident managers to appreciate their particular approach to making decisions. In this real-world cauldron of conflict and contention, of choice and uncertainty, and of change and complexity, this sense of confidence is needed for effective leadership. Mentoring and shadowing programs within the agency itself then are needed to help potential managers to develop this sense of confident humility about their decisions.

4.      Empowering Environments – Managers work within organizations, be they governmental, non-governmental or parastatals. Organizations have cultures, they have norms, they have expectations, they have traditions, and they have bureaucrats. Everybody has a boss with viewpoints, perspectives and priorities. This culture may disempower managers or empower them.

Libby Khumalo and I argue in a forthcoming article to be published in Tourism Recreation Research that empowerment means that organizations carefully manage the four types of power they wield, often unknowingly: the power over, or the ability to control people, their decisions, and behavior in order to ensure predictability and stability within an organization; the power to, or ability of a person to pursue their own goals within the context of an agency’s vision and mission; power with deals with collective power, the ability to get things done cooperatively and without formal coercion; and finally, power within, which is an increased will for change, expressed through self-confidence, assertiveness and awareness.

By empowering managers, organizations encourage them to think critically, act competently, and decide confidently—in other words to pursue the organization’s vision and mission with enthusiasm and with a focus on learning, both critically needed in the protected area world of the 21^st century.

Participants in the CSU Mobile Seminar on Sustainable Tourism and Protected Areas at Fairy Falls, Yellowstone National Park.