See this video taken at the World Parks Conference introducing a special issue of Koedoe dedicated to Tourism and Protected Areas:  .

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.

Reframing Human-Wildlife Conflict

The principal purpose laying at the foundation of The Pasque Flower is to discuss new ways of thinking about contemporary protected area planning challenges and opportunities. A recently published manuscript co-authored by several of us demonstrates that thinking differently and at deeper levels may lead to new and useful insights. This paper, published in Oryx (First view, link http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0030605312000555) uses the notion of mind mapping to uncover mental models of causes of human-wildlife conflict in Namibia, a country which is increasingly dependent on wildlife as a basis for attracting visitors and thus as a diversifying economic development strategy.

As I have noted before, a mental model is a simplified representation of the real world each of us have developed to deal with complexity and uncertainty in any given arena. In the current context, mental models of conflict underlie strategies and tactics to reduce conflict. For Namibia, this is an important question, for as investments in mitigating and preventing conflict have risen, so has the number of conflicts, suggesting that a new way of thinking would be useful to better understand the causes of conflict and effective responses.

In our paper, we discuss how we used small group processes combined with mind mapping software to identify mental models of conflict. A mind map is a graphical representation of factors that contribute to or influence a concept. The concept is located at the center of a graphic, the major factors affecting it are represented by arms, and then additional arms affecting those arms are also identified.

Shown below is one of the mind maps generated in this workshop. The figure shows that for the small group gathered, there were seven major factors affecting human-wildlife conflict: poor land use planning, inadequate management policies, family livelihoods, negative attitudes toward wildlife, increasing wildlife populations, proximity to protected areas, external influences, and increased competition for land and grazing. As the mind map shows, each of these arms is then influenced by other factors.

The closer an arm is to the central concept the greater the leverage that is possible in reducing conflict. Our experience is that many mitigation measures are focused on things easy to do, but with little leverage, such as aversive conditioning.

Thinking about our mental models, and thus diving deeper into the causes of human-wildlife conflict, reveals potential actions and strategies that would have greater leverage in reducing such conflict. Please read the article for more information.

Reframing Human-Wildlife Conflict

The principal purpose laying at the foundation of The Pasque Flower is to discuss new ways of thinking about contemporary protected area planning challenges and opportunities. A recently published manuscript co-authored by several of us demonstrates that thinking differently and at deeper levels may lead to new and useful insights. This paper, published in Oryx (First view, link http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0030605312000555) uses the notion of mind mapping to uncover mental models of causes of human-wildlife conflict in Namibia, a country which is increasingly dependent on wildlife as a basis for attracting visitors and thus as a diversifying economic development strategy.

As I have noted before, a mental model is a simplified representation of the real world each of us have developed to deal with complexity and uncertainty in any given arena. In the current context, mental models of conflict underlie strategies and tactics to reduce conflict. For Namibia, this is an important question, for as investments in mitigating and preventing conflict have risen, so has the number of conflicts, suggesting that a new way of thinking would be useful to better understand the causes of conflict and effective responses.

In our paper, we discuss how we used small group processes combined with mind mapping software to identify mental models of conflict. A mind map is a graphical representation of factors that contribute to or influence a concept. The concept is located at the center of a graphic, the major factors affecting it are represented by arms, and then additional arms affecting those arms are also identified.

Shown below is one of the mind maps generated in this workshop. The figure shows that for the small group gathered, there were seven major factors affecting human-wildlife conflict: poor land use planning, inadequate management policies, family livelihoods, negative attitudes toward wildlife, increasing wildlife populations, proximity to protected areas, external influences, and increased competition for land and grazing. As the mind map shows, each of these arms is then influenced by other factors.

The closer an arm is to the central concept the greater the leverage that is possible in reducing conflict. Our experience is that many mitigation measures are focused on things easy to do, but with little leverage, such as aversive conditioning.

Thinking about our mental models, and thus diving deeper into the causes of human-wildlife conflict, reveals potential actions and strategies that would have greater leverage in reducing such conflict. Please read the article for more information.

The International Seminar on Protected Area Management – Saving Our Natural Heritage One Manager at a Time

They came from 22 nations, 27 protected area managers from all regions of our globe, from the Russian far east to the upper reaches of the Amazon basin, from central Africa to the Caucuses of Europe. The International Seminar on Protected Area Management (ISPAM), in its 14^th year, has become a highly recognized effective force in building the individual capacities of managers to protect the world’s increasingly threatened natural heritage. Sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service, the University of Montana and the University of Idaho, 375 managers from 80 countries have engaged the three week long course focusing on protected areas in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming in its 14 years.

The Seminar focuses on four themes that challenge nearly every protected area on the globe: engaging publics and communities, integrated planning, managing tourism and visitation, and managing across boundaries in the face of climate change. Participants share experiences and knowledge in each of these themes, interact with American park managers, conduct exercises to enhance their learning and challenge each other’s mental models of them. 

Protected area management is often about crossing boundaries as depicted
symbolically in this group photo of 2013 ISPAM participants and staff
at the boundary between Idaho and Montana

The seminar is built on several principles. First, the co-directors strongly believe that participants hold the knowledge that is needed to address these challenges; that knowledge needs to be brought out and tested in the discussions in the seminar. Second, interacting with American park managers is not done to show how to do something, but rather as a way of revealing the participants’ own approaches hidden from them in their own mental models. Third, participants are encouraged to “dive deeper” in searching for the patterns, structures and systems lying below the surface of individual events, a process I have encouraged in previous blog entries.

This year we learned a lot about uncertainty, as we had to move from our camp at the Magruder Ranger Station deep in central Idaho’s wilderness environment because of a rapidly growing wildland fire that unexpectedly changed direction. This demonstrated not only that the world is not predictable, but also tested our adaptive management skills as we had to think quickly about new accommodation!

But such tests are minor compared to the significant challenges faced by many of our ISPAM participants, such as Flavio Bocarde, manager for Pico da Neblina, 22,000 square kilometers of Amazon forest in the northwest of Brazil. Flavio manages this biodiverse important area with 3 staff. It is also a culturally diverse area involving 13 resident ethnic groups in 46 villages. 

Flavio and I atop Redsleep Mountain on the National Bison Range

While no tourism is currently permitted in the park, that doesn’t mean Flavio is not confronted with numerous challenges everyday, particularly with respect to engaging these groups to assist in management. Management, to be effective, must be culturally appropriate and communicating with these groups means lots of listening time—a proficiency needed by every protected area manager. While Flavio has education in geographic information systems, he recognizes that such advanced technology does not allow him to see everything in the forest, much of which would be culturally and spiritually significant to local indigenous peoples.

It’s been my privilege to work not only with the participants from nearly the beginning (with short presentations and a few days exposure each year), but for the last five years as a co-director with Wayne Freimund, Libby Khumalo, Bill McLaughlin and Laura Becerra. We have grown as well, not only in our roles but also in our awareness of the deep complexity of protected area challenges in an increasingly contentious and changing world.

ISPAM 2013 Co-directors Bill, Wayne, Laura, Libby and Steve.
A greater team there never was.

Our experiences raising interesting questions about what proficiencies are needed to protect natural heritage, how we develop competency in these proficiencies, and how we evaluate the success not only of individual managers but international conventions dealing with the protection of natural and cultural heritage. ISPAM is one response to those questions, but we need to have dozens of ISPAMs every year scattered across the globe to upgrade manager qualifications. Over 120,000 protected areas are officially recognized, each one needs the same careful and passionate stewardship that ISPAM participants provide. How will we accomplish this goal in a world that seems less inclined to support formalized continuing education capacity building programs?