What to do when tourism is threatening natural capital in a protected area

What can managers do to respond to accelerating visitation of protected areas that threaten the natural capital preserved within? This question was addressed in a recent publication authored by Andrew Drumm (a consultant who formerly worked for The Nature Conservancy), myself and Jim Rieger of The Nature Conservancy. Tourism has become big business in many of the globe’s 140,000 nationally nominated national parks, wildernesses and other types of protected areas. Tourism not only provides visitors with opportunities to see, experience, appreciate and learn about our natural heritage, but it provides opportunities for personal income for local residents and revenues for those areas. And yet, tourism has distinct drawbacks, that if not carefully addressed can become a threat. We note:

Protected area systems face a critical situation in which policy makers increasingly promote tourism within protected areas even while managers lack the basic capacity to manage the impacts of current visitor numbers. At the core of this dilemma is the concept of a “threshold of sustainability.” This is the point at which the management capacity of a protected area is sufficient to mitigate the most critical tourism-related threats, such that public use is limited to the parameters of sustainability of the natural capital within the site.

When there is an immediate threat to natural capital forming the basis of a protected area’s reason for being, how can managers effectively respond? This Nature Conservancy Quick Guide offers a framework for making important decisions, helping managers think critically about the character of the threat, what values are threatened and how. Understanding the threat can then lead to effective responses rather than reacting without thinking through possible management.

Briefly, the Thresholds of Sustainability framework—which is principally a way to structure our thinking about a tourism related threat—involves the following major components or steps:

· Step 1: Identify threatened natural capital, the most critical tourism-related threats, and key management issues: Identify threatened, tourism-related conservation objectives, the impact that tourism and other threats are having on them, and identify the extent to which protected area staff are able to prevent and mitigate these threats.

• Step 2: Identify efficient actions to address critical tourism-related threats: Identify which strategies will be most effective at addressing tourism-related threats.

• Step 3: Assess tourism finances in the protected area: At a minimum in the rapid response mode, identify the financial gap between existing and required funds and identify potential revenue sources and financial mechanisms. If resources and time permit, then begin to build the financial case for increasing funds available for protected area management by also estimating the economic impact of tourism on the destination, and identifying potential complementary opportunities, such as tourism concessions and co-management opportunities.

• Step 4: Assess the broader enabling environment: Assess the legal, regulatory, institutional, administrative and policy environment and assess the extent to which this environment enables effective management of tourism within protected areas. This should be done to different extents in both the rapid response and long-term planning situations.

• Step 5: Develop and implement a communications strategy: Although communication and participation is important at every point of the threshold of sustainability framework, accumulation of the breadth of information in Steps 1-4 requires development of a formal communications strategy to help win the support of key audiences and change policies.

• Step 6: Implement actions and monitor results: Establish basic infrastructure and capacities needed to 1) achieve minimum management effectiveness, 2) implement new funding mechanisms, and 3) monitor results, including the impact of threats, the status and trends of biodiversity health, community benefits, and the effectiveness of management interventions.

The Quick Guide provides detailed guidelines on how to accomplish each of these tasks along with case studies. You can download English, Spanish and French versions of the 44 page publication:

http://conserveonline.org/library/the-threshold-of-sustainability-for-tourism-in/view.html.

http://conserveonline.org/library/el-umbral-de-la-sostenibilidad-para-el-turismo/view.html.

http://conserveonline.org/library/le-seuil-de-viabilite-du-tourisme-dans-les-aires/@@view.html.

What is Our Mental Model for Building Professional Competencies?

I spent last week in Taiwan where I had been invited, as a result of some other circumstances, to present a series of lectures at several universities concerning protected area stewardship. It is quite an honor to receive these invitations and I have learned much about what people in this country think about protected area planning and management of visitors.


These lectures, and the interaction with students, professionals and academics reinforce my feelings about developing critical thinking as an important professional competency. It also reinforces my perception that enhancing performance is more than simply giving workshops and then seeing participants returning to a normal work setting. Building the professional competencies needed to address the complex issues, challenges and opportunities of 21st century park management requires something more. This is not to say that conceptual skills are not a necessary condition to higher performance; they are necessary, but not sufficient.

Our current model of building performance can be loosely described as follows:

But we know now, that increased performance under this model is probably more a matter of chance than anything else. Upon returning from a workshop, seminar, shortcourse, job twinning or some similar capacity building exercise, a variety of barriers present themselves to the newly trained protected area manager. These include changed job description with different duties, jealous supervisors, a highly hierarchal organization that does not place a premium on learning, lack of incentives, little confidence by the trainee and so on.

We need to take another look at the model above. Not only does it not display what really happens, but it also downplays the role of job performance itself in increasing capacity. We need to take a systems thinking look at how capacity (in the form of enhanced professional competencies) actually works. So below is a simplified systems thinking approach to look at the relationship between capacity and performance, and what may influence performance.

A system is composed of a number of interacting components with the interactions often characterized by delays of different lengths. Here we see that building capacity does lead, potentially to enhanced performance; in systems thinking terms this is a reinforcing loop. Importantly though, enhanced performance also can lead to increased capacity or professional competency, particularly as managers gain confidence and experience in successfully addressing various issues, opportunities and challenges. This of course then potentially leads to even higher levels of performance

But in the middle of the graphic we see a couple of balancing loops, which serve to depress levels of performance. In the graphic, I have used the example of an organization’s incentive structure. Now many protected area managers are not motivated by financial incentives but rather opportunities for leadership, recognition and advancement (although research on this is needed). So if successfully struggling with complex problems is not recognized, there develops a negative feedback that dampens performance. Dampening performance, as we see in the reinforcing loop on the left leads to even further declines in performance.

In this case, a so-called ‘external” factor, an organization’s vision (for example, there are of course many other possibilities) may affect it system for awarding incentives for excellent performance. If one provides excellent performance but is not rewarded, then performance may decrease. So making changes in performance may require changing the organization’s attitude toward learning, and its incentive structure.

Of course, there are delays in this system. It may take a while before enhanced capability leads to increased performance. Incentive structures may not have a positive or negative impact for a while. The lack of an organizational vision that encourages dialogue and learning may have little impact at first on the newly trained or educated manager. But eventually, such factors will begin to take their toll, leading the organization capacity building efforts into a downward, and difficult to change, spiral.

So, the lesson of all this is for me, we need to think more systemically in terms of capacity building efforts. We simply can no longer afford to develop training workshops (“talkshops” to many) without consideration of the organizational environment into which the trainees will be placed.

More about this next time.

Building Capacity for Protected Area Planning -- A Brief Note

Even though I am “retired”, it is often difficult to sit down and put together my blog. It seems that I am much busier than when I had a full time appointment with UM, but perhaps I was just more efficient in those days.


There is always a lot of talk around protected area circles concerning capacity: simply put, many believe that the greatest advances in protection and conservation can be made by building skills and capabilities of those charged with protected area stewardship. And, I think they are right in a general sense. But the notion of building capacity goes far beyond these words: what capacities for what and for whom? We all know that protected area organizations are differentiated horizontally and vertically: jobs may be highly specialized in some agerncies, and there is frequently variation in the span of control. So different organizational levels, it could be argued require different capacities.

Typically, I hear organizations—both government and nongovernment—arguing for training as the response to the need for capacity building. Well, training may indeed, and probably is needed, but not for everyone. Others in the organization may require continuing education; the kind of skills these individuals will need are more critical thinking skills than the practical skills implied in the notion of training. Well, why? Well, if protected areas are indeed embedded in the complex, contentious, changing and uncertain environment that I have argued that they are, then we can never predict what may happen in the future, even tomorrow. So we need managers that can respond to rapidly developing situations with the conceptual and thinking skills needed to analyze what is going on, synthesize underlying trends and structures and frame these new challenges in ways that address the underlying causes not just their symptoms. They need these capacities in order to be prepared for the inevitable surprises that come along.

In an interesting paper on “Empowering People for Sustainable Development” Jonathan Cook made an important differentiation between capacity and performance. Capacity, he said, represented the potential, while performance was the actual results of working in an environment, the outcome, if you will, of decisions. So while we might emphasize building capacity, what we want to do in the long run, is to enhance performance.

Now, in our area, capacity means holding an array of professional competencies such as:

• Critical thinking

• Concessions or licensee management

• Business management

• Interpretation

• Understanding the structure of the tourism industry

• Communication and public engagement

• Planning and modeling

Obviously, no one person can hold all these professional competencies, but should not a proficient manager hold the capacity to ask penetrating questions, to motivate staff, or to help a community establish goals or become more resilient in order to face uncertainty?

Capacity, Cook argued, is a prerequisite to performance, that is, without the necessary skills, one is likely not to do too well. Imagine hiring a carpenter to help put up a house that had little or no skill in using a hammer or saw? Would there be a result other than disaster? Of course, the carpenter could be mentored under the tutelage of a master craftsman to build capacity as the house is being constructed.

So it is quite natural, that agencies would want to focus on building capacities. But Cook also argued that Capacity is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for performance, which is the ultimate goal. Other factors, such as personal confidence, organizational structure and incentives, experience and personal challenge are also significant in influencing the level of performance. So perhaps the question we should be asking is: What can be done to enhance the performance of managers to protect the values for which an area was designated? Rather than, what capacities are needed to manage a specific place? What this means is that building professional competencies and seeing them implemented requires an integrated approach, with attention to both the individual and the organization within which the individual works.

Cook’s final point was that performance breeds capacity. What he is saying here is that as individuals enhance their performance, their capacity increases as well. This makes sense. As one does better in a job, a number of results occur: confidence builds, new opportunities are seen, constructed or exploited; networks of peers develop, exposing the individual to new ideas to be tested and evaluated; learning happens.

So, to build performance, particularly in the wicked and messy world of the 21st century, we need to build capacities. At the middle management level, these capacities focus more on critical thinking skills than on practical skills. But building capacity only raises potential. Enhanced performance requires other factors in the job environment to be addressed.

[1] Cook, J. 1997. Empowering people for sustainable development. In P. Fitzgerald, A. McLennan and B. Munslow (eds.), Managing Sustainable Development in South Africa, 275-292. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.

Limits of Acceptable Change and Judgments about Impacts

I recently completed a draft manuscript of a handbook on tourism and the environment. I was asked to write a chapter on Limits of Acceptable Change and Tourism. In writing that chapter, I decided it was important that readers not only have the opportunity to read about the steps to the LAC framework, but also be exposed to certain issues which have arisen in the literature including carrying capacity. Now I cannot reveal all that I wrote, but I thought I would raise the question of a couple of strengths of LAC in relation to some of the criticism I sometimes see.


Now if you don’t know what LAC is, it is a process designed in the mid-1980s to help Wilderness managers in the U.S. grapple with the question of managing visitors and their impacts, both social and biophysical. Since then, it has become widely known and practiced both in the U.S. and abroad. Several variants exist, including the US National Park Service designed Visitor Experience and Resource Protection (VERP) process, but LAC remains a very visible process.

One of the criticisms that LAC and similar frameworks receive is that they allow degradation of biophysical conditions to occur, that by allowing some change to occur, impacts are deemed socially acceptable, thus leading to a gradual, inevitable loss of the qualities for which the area was designated. The criticism goes on to often include a statement along the lines that if managers would establish a carrying capacity, such degradation would not occur. Of course, I believe that this criticism is based on a mis-understanding of the relationships between use levels and impact and a miscasting of the standard setting process that is a part of LAC.

First, in a nature-dominated setting, such as a designated Wilderness, national park backcountry or similar area, any level of human use leads to some changes in the natural environment. When a hiker, for example, walks along a previously unused area, there is an impact—however slight, even if not measurable with current technology. Impacts occur relatively quickly, disproportionate to use levels. This conclusion has been well established in the recreation ecology literature for decades. So, if visitors are allowed to use an area, then some impact will occur. The question then becomes not one of preventing impacts but one of determining how much impact would be acceptable given the natural heritage present, demand for the area and objectives established for it. Whether an impact is one that can be described as “degradation” is another decision. The LAC process makes the determination of acceptable change explicit, subject to debate and part of the social discourse around protected area management.

Second, the practical implication of carrying capacity, as it has been applied in the literature, shows that visitor use is often permitted, thus impacts occur, and as a result, degradation of natural heritage might happen. However, in establishing such carrying capacities, the judgments about the acceptability of such impacts are often hidden, not subject to review, debate and discourse. Those judgments reflect not a healthy public engagement process but rather an elite that has been privileged to make such decisions. The unfortunate thing about this is that the people making such decisions may not even understand that they are making decisions about acceptability of impacts. These decisions may be hidden in an illusion of scientific objectivity, they may buried in assumptions, often only implicit, that are never revealed because the research is never subject to debate because of the overall elitist stature of science.

Now, I am not opposed to science. We absolutely need science and the knowledge it generates to help us move forward and strengthen our protected area management capabilities. But, science helps inform decisions, not direct them. The process of protected area management is filled with value judgments, such as the ones involved in setting standards. What we want to do is to explicate that process so it is transparent and so that decision makers can be held accountable. LAC does this, carrying capacity does not.

Some Thoughts on the Nature of Sharing Benefits from Ecosystem-based Services

In its historic report on the state of ecosystems on our planet (Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis), the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) links the condition of ecosystems and the services they provide to the quality of life for the world’s human population. The report goes on to project In the preface to the report, the authors provide a provisional definition of services: Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems (p 5.). The report goes on to address five key, salient questions to the future of human life on this planet:


 What are the current condition and trends of ecosystems, ecosystem services, and human well-being?

 What are plausible future changes in ecosystems and their ecosystem services and the consequent changes in human well-being?

 What can be done to enhance well-being and conserve ecosystems? What are the strengths and weaknesses of response options that can be considered to realize or avoid specific futures?

 What are the key uncertainties that hinder effective decision-making concerning ecosystems?

 What tools and methodologies developed and used in the MA can strengthen capacity to assess ecosystems, the services they provide, their impacts on human well-being, and the strengths and weaknesses of response options?

Key components of the report are frameworks linking various biotic, abiotic, cultural, demographic and political processes that affect ecosystem services and how they impact human well-being.

The Millenium Assessment has triggered quite a bit of dialogue, and enhanced the argument that protected areas have saliency for all humans, for they contain the natural capital that sustains the variety of services that ecosystems provide. The Assessment identified several different kinds of services:

 provisioning services such as food, water, timber, and fiber;

 regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water quality;

 cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and

 supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling.

At the same time that the MEA suggested these four kinds of services, and defined benefits as services, it also provided a bit of confusion. Later in the report (specifically beginning on page 5 and in a number of instances thereafter, the MEA differentiated between services and benefits. For example, on page 7 at the bottom of Table 1 the report states: For regulating and supporting services, enhancement refers to a change in the service that leads to greater benefits for people. Later, the text returns to a definition of services as benefits.

This change in the use of terms has been, I believe, a foundation for some confusion for scientists who are interested in doing work on enhancing the quality of life for people, researching how services are impacted (positively or negatively), activists pressuring for protection of the natural capital that provides these services and local people who depend directly on their adjacent natural capital. This confusion raises a lot of questions: Are benefits and services the same things? Is an ecosystem service simply a synonym for benefit? If services are benefits, what produces the benefits? What is a benefit if it is not a service? So, I prepared this short essay to share some of the questions in my mind about the relationship between ecosystem services, the benefits they provide and how they possibly could be distributed. For me, this was a necessary exercise to clarify things, although I do not anticipate any universal consensus on what is stated here.

What are ecosystem services?

Natural capital—nature made things along with abiotic and biotic processes that interact with these—is fundamental to human life. Without such services as nutrient cycling, climatic and weather variation, interspecific and intraspecific competition, carbon storage, water cleansing and photosynthesis, there would simply be no life on this planet. These services are services only in the sense that we as humans use that word to describe them. The first figure in the MEA clearly shows that services are important to and distinct from human well-being:

The figure clearly differentiates services from human well-being. I will return the question of benefits just below.

But in my mind a service is some kind of biotic or abiotic process applied to natural capital that can be exploited for human benefit.

What is a benefit?

Benefits from ecosystem services do not just occur, with perhaps a couple of exceptions. Human capital—in the form of technology, ideas, money, institutions and leadership—is required to transform those services into benefits which can be defined as “improved condition” or “human well-being”. So, for humans to exploit the naturally occurring ecosystem service of cleansing water, they must divert that water for domestic purposes (sometimes this diversion requires just a small amount of human capital, other times, much more). Potable water is the result of the human capital applied to the service.

Other improved conditions may include production of protein, vitamins, calories and so on for human food, or the view of a beautiful scene resulting from erosional processes. They may be more indirect such as money income accruing to an entrepreneur from exploiting access to pure water in a river by selling river rafting trips. The money income may be used to purchase other benefits or access to other ecosystem-based benefits.

Here I do depart from the MEA a bit. I do not see cultural, aesthetic or recreational values as a service, but as a benefit resulting from certain ecosystem services, such as erosion, plant growth, and so on once human capital has been applied.

Incidentally, benefits may also be direct, such as potable water, or indirect, such as a guide employed by tourists interested in seeing native fauna. In fact, in my experience in dealing with tourism occurring in protected areas, benefits are almost exclusively defined in practice as money income resulting from tourist expenditures. This money income can then be used to enhance human well-being.

So, in sum benefits, in terms of improved conditions result from the application of human capital to the services any given ecosystem provides. This differentiation in no way degrades the importance of ecosystem services in providing the sustaining conditions for human life. Indeed, when such services are degraded, the investments in human capital to restore them are much higher than exploiting them sustainably. We have to invent all kinds of substitutes to ecosystem services, which are likely not so efficient as nature. For example, when water is subject to pollution, that water must be treated through the application of very expensive human capital and technology before it can be used for domestic purposes.

How are benefits from ecosystem-services accessed and distributed to humans?

When ecosystem services result in benefits, there is a question of who receives the benefits, as well as who gets to make this decision. This decision is of incredible political and economic significance. The sharing of benefits from genetic resources has been the subject of debate and discussion for nearly 20 years. An international convention on this issue was one of the primary focal points of the recent Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity held in Nagoya, Japan. The announced agreement was contentious. The agreement was posed as one on Access and Benefit Sharing of Genetic Resources. We will see if the parties to the agreement actually ratify it. The decision on how to distribute benefits has two components: (1) one general dealing with what distribution mechanisms are appropriate and acceptable to any given society; and (2) one more specific dealing with the notion of “sharing” benefits. I will address each component in turn.

In any given society, there are mechanisms for distributing benefits among that particular population. There are always mechanisms, even if those mechanisms result in what some would criticize as being unfair. The notion of fairness underlies many contemporary discussions of benefit distribution. Of course, what is a fair distribution mechanism is often the subject of considerable, and often, acrimonious social discourse.

I believe there are four basic mechanisms. My belief is based on experience in addressing the issue of access to river recreation opportunities in the western United States. In the early 1970s, the managers of many of these rivers (e.g., the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, the Selway and Salmon Rivers in Idaho, the Green and Yampa Rivers in Utah, etc.) began to limit visitor use of those rivers to either protect their biophysical character or to provide an opportunity for certain recreational experiences. Because the demand for these experiences was significantly higher than the use limits implemented, rationing of the limited use was imposed. At the time, I started, with several graduate students, and examination of these use limit policies, rationing and allocation mechanisms, and the various consequences. Other academic colleagues, such as Rich Schreyer, David Lime and Bo Shelby were also involved in parallel lines of inquiry. We quickly found that there is no universally accepted definition of what “fair” is. One river manager may have used one type of rationing mechanism (e.g., a lottery) while another may have used a reservation system.

Our research community found that each mechanism, which in effect was a benefit or access distribution mechanism, affected various groups (the young, the old, those who could plan ahead, those who could not, those who were wealthy, those who had a lot of time) differently and thus definitions of faired varied.

It quickly came to us that there were four methods or approaches of allocation scarce resources, or in this case, benefits based on ecosystem-services. Those mechanisms may be based on equality—every member of the population receives the same portion of the benefits; they may be based on need—members of the population, the disadvantaged for example, may receive larger portions in order to assist in overcoming the disadvantages; they may be based on equity—members of the populations are apportioned benefits based on some measure of their contribution or investment in that population; or they may be based on efficiency—the willingness of members to pay money for access to the benefits (just a note, this is based on some reading I did a long time ago, and I cannot now find the reference). Now at some point, there are decisions made by someone or a group in a society as to which mechanism or set of mechanism will be used. In the case of river recreation in the US West, such decisions were generally made by individual river managers, but were subject to an enormous amount of polemical activity.

Often, we found managers using combinations: a certain portion of the use limit may be rationed through a lottery while another portion would be allocated based on need for example.

Now the same kind of question faces distribution of benefits from ecosystem-based services. Which one, or more realistically, combination, of approaches will be used? How will we make these decisions? Who will make these decisions? Why them? These are important political and social questions that a research program, in total, will need to address.

So, we need to think about the consequences of different decision-making modes, and we need to be specific about those modes. Understanding the consequences, even if it is simply descriptive, without being normative will help us all better assess the costs and benefits of various benefit-sharing approaches.

In my mind, neo-classical economics was focused principally on understanding the social efficiency, narrowly defined as market value, of various decision alternatives. That focus was a major contributor to the evolution of sustainable development as a response, because the focus on efficiency led in many cases to classes of people being marginalized in terms of their access to ecosystem-based benefits. The response developed in a number of fields, including economics, which appears to not only have broadened the its definition of efficiency, but also developed ecological economics as a way of dealing with the focus on efficiency. A focus on efficiency also led to the accumulation of capital which then led to an accumulation of political power, reinforcing the importance of efficiency as a method of distributing benefits.

What is meant by benefit-sharing?

Dominating much of the discussion about ecosystem-based benefits and their distribution has been the notion of sharing. Sharing of benefits is rarely mentioned in the MEA (at least in the synthesis). Page 126 criticizes large dams because the benefits “are rarely shared equitably” with the poor and vulnerable. But what is meant by sharing? Actually, I see two parts to this question: (1) the notion of sharing something; and (2) the notion of equitable sharing, as mentioned in the MEA.

So, lets go through the four mechanisms of distribution as a start. If people receive equal portions, then is this a synonym for “sharing”? It would be, at least for me, if two conditions are met: First, the current system of portioning benefits favors some and not others, that is, some people receive larger portions of a benefit than others. Second, the decision to share is not done coercively, that is those who currently receive larger portions voluntarily relinquish the “extra” to those who currently receive less than others.

If benefits are allocated based on need, would this qualify as sharing? I would think so, as providing assistance to people in need is an important human quality. One person is willing to give up something for those in need or who are vulnerable to shocks. We give something up because simply, this is something we do. We “share” are limited resources so other people can benefit.

If benefits are allocated based on equity, would this be sharing. Here, I think this would not be a definition of sharing, at least as I have defined equity above. The distribution is, one could argue, a return on one’s investment, if measured in terms of human capital inputs. The decision allocated based on inputs, of course, is still a political one. Now the MEA on page 126 refers to sharing as some kind of equity proposition. Perhaps, this term was not used accurately, or perhaps there is an assumption (which does often prove out) that poor and vulnerable people have more investment in ecosystem services. I don’t know which. But, it would be good to find out what is meant by an equitable distribution in the sense of benefit sharing.

If benefit distributions are based on efficiency, then I would think that this is not sharing. Efficiency is fundamentally defined as the highest and best value, as measured by the marketplace. Here, those who have the highest capability/willingness to pay, receive the benefits. This is not sharing in my mind.

These comments imply that sharing is an ethical, voluntary decision in which some people give up something without an expectation of return. Or it may be done in an altruistic belief that society will be better off by sharing benefits equally or to those in need. So, I have just purchased a slice of apple pie, but my friend cannot because there are none left. With little or no expectation that at some point in the future this will be repaid, I voluntarily suggest to him I will share the pie and give him some of the one I purchase. I do this not with an expectation that I will receive some direct return, but in a belief that this is what friends do, that our friendship will be strengthened by this sharing.

Thus, people, who would normally receive larger portions, under an equal distribution system would then be “sharing” with others who formerly did not receive the same amount if they were not coerced to do so. The same could be said about need being a basis for distribution of benefits. So, is coercion a component of the notion of sharing? In other words, if some people are forced to give up some benefits so others can receive larger portions, are they really sharing?

Coercion occurs in many forms, and the hierarchal and distributive approaches described in the Nkhata and others paper could be viewed as forms of coercion. But coercion might also be a characteristic of egalitarian approaches. So, I give up some of my income to pay taxes so others’ children can go to school. These taxes are not voluntary; they are a result of governance processes in which majority rules. People who vote against such taxes are coerced into paying them because if they do not, they will incur severe penalties. The coercion is based on an ethical framework that suggests different mechanisms of benefit distribution are needed to counterbalance the negative consequences of a focus on efficiency.

So here I am with this bit of a discourse trying to sort out in my mind what is meant by services, benefits and benefit sharing. Of course, these are important, and contested, concepts, so a full resolution is not anticipated. But a good discourse and debate on their meanings would help all of us.

What Way Forward for Protected Area Planning?

Given the complexities, wickedness and messiness of contemporary protected area planning that I have described over the past several weeks, and, given the character of a new style of planning that I described, what can we do to forge an effective path to the future? What do we need to do to get there, to implement a holistic style of planning.There are three specific actions we can take that to implement holistic planning. I note here that I am referring to academics and agency personnel—there are other actions, such as dealing with institutional structures, policies and laws, that may also be required.


First, we must frame parks and protected areas as integral components of the social-ecological systems in which they are embedded. We must acknowledge that these very special places are influenced by a variety of processes, trends, stresses and events most of which occur outside their boundaries. But we do not consider those variables as exogenous—they are part of the system that affects parks. By applying systems thinking, we come to a better understanding of the leverage points that influence parks and we apply resources to those points. And by thinking in systems terms we make parks and protected areas more relevant to people at large, for those parks contain natural capital that lead to certain services (such as water purification) that ultimately provide benefits to people. This is a major re-framing of the role of parks and protected areas in society—something I will discuss in future blogs.

Second, we develop a focus on learning in our protected area practice. By this, I mean we treat management as experiments, monitor outcomes, reflect on those outcomes and change management as needed. This is not a new suggestion, many others in the field of natural resources have made similar suggestions. But to practice management as learning, we need to do more than add a checkbox on the management or planning form, we need to cultivate a culture of curiosity, reflection and critical thinking. These are values that must be deeply embedded in protected area organizations, not just used as slogans on brochures and letterheads. Embedding these values will both a while and good leadership.

Third, we develop learning platforms that enhance the technical and professional competencies needed for protected area stewardship. A learning platform would involve at least three components (1) academic instructional and research programs focusing on protected area planning and management at the undergraduate and graduate level; (2) continuing education in contemporary topics confronting protected areas based on adult learning principles; and (3) implementation of a community of practice to provide opportunities for dialogue, raise questions, construct management approaches and most importantly build confidence among managers.

With protected areas subject to a wide variety of stresses and with important recognition of their role in protecting the globe’s remaining biodiversity, we need (1) new approaches to planning and management, (2) cadres of managers holding the professional competencies required for 21st century stewardship, (3) universities providing new knowledge about how these systems operate, and (4) respect for the traditional forms of knowledge that have in large part got us here.

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.