How do we use systems thinking in the turbulent world of outdoor recreation and tourism?

And why would we want to learn systems thinking to improve our actions in dealing with outdoor recreation and tourism? These questions are the basis for a newly published article in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism written by myself, and based on years of experience working with wildland managers, planners and scientists. After all, learning systems thinking is not the easiest thing to do, and applying it is probably more difficult too.

Well, as I noted many times before, the world is turbulent and changing. I should note here that the world has always been changing, but the pace and type of change is itself always changing. So change is not new, but COVID has been a dramatic showcase of change, and academically, a good demonstration of the presence of change. Using systems thinking is key to understanding this change, and then what to do about it. Systems thinking avoids the immediate reaction of many managers and tourism destination administrators to find simplistic approaches, which are often called “solutions” to the results of underlying change. In a period of dramatic change, we don’t solve problems (arrive at solutions), but we resolve them (come to agreement as to how we can resolve the problem for the time being, because we know the context is constantly changing (note: there is a reference to this, but I cant find this).

So the manuscript is worth a quick read, and then reflection on what it says. The article is available for free until February 25, 2022 at https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fauthors.elsevier.com%2Fa%2F1eNBT7tCXXJK-n&data=04%7C01%7Cstephen.mccool%40umontana.edu%7Cf2a35892988b42594e2508d9d117a763%7C68407ce503da49ffaf0a724be0d37c9d%7C0%7C0%7C637770722882145280%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000&sdata=xAMAmYmkON%2FokCdVvtmUyVf5Cf1P2fLkPJAmlxSydQo%3D&reserved=0.

 How do We Deal with Our Agendas in a Time of Turbulence?

We all know that times are difficult, that protected area managers are challenged like never before, that planning and then implementation are difficult to put together. Yet, in this difficult time, we still have that job to do.

We are tempted to search for simplistic solutions, particularly in light of the accelerating demand for protected area tourism. These are solutions that quick to implement, but focused primarily on challenges that are really just symptoms of deeper down trends. In this talk, given at the Virtual Conference on Improving Tourism in Protected Areas amidst the COVID Pandemic, I shared three actions we need to take when dealing with our short and longterm agendas. These are Diving Deeper, Thinking Differently and Acting Holistically. This video develops the rationale for this way of linking thinking with doing and provides examples. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFEa9cPh6K4

 

New Report on Forest Service involvement in Public Use Management on Brazil Federal Protected Areas in Brazil

I was fortunate to work with a large group of U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and University faculty and Brazilian conservation unit managers, central office planners and professors the last five years on a project to enhance connections between the Brazilian public and their public lands. Attached is the final report to USAID which funded most of that effort. It was a great experience, and as I have said before, strangers became colleagues who eventually become friends.

The work in Brazil was heavy and busy at times; my work was principally dealing with classes on protected area planning, facilitated also by American and Brazilian colleagues. This occurred in different parts of Brazil and the Brazilian Amazon. We both learned a lot during this time, and often employed double-loop learning. Thanks to Michelle Zweede from Forest Service International Programs and Suelene Couto and Lorena Brewster who helped with the program design and implementation. All the meeting were conducted with simultaneous translation conducted by incredible translators of Polare, a fine company from Brazil.

Those of you who want to take a look at the report, which is very different from many reports, can click on the link below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dDfXocQSGy7Il0yhgyrNb2bQIAzTZX7E/view?usp=sharing

Steve McCool and Keith Bosak produce new book on Research and Sustainable Tourism

One aspect of managing for sustainable tourism is research and science. As our knowledge base increases we build understanding of how resilient systems and communities function and the role of tourism in working toward that goal. Steve and Keith have put together a new book published by Edward Elgar Publishing. Titled "A Research Agenda for Sustainable Tourism" or RAST for short, the authors, from many places in the world, identify important previous research and information needs confronting tourism destination and protected area managers, academics and other scientists. The book contains 15 chapters on such subjects as sustainable tourism research and climate change, public lands, UN Development Goals, systems thinking, health, business, community based tourism, and marketing. Each chapter is written by experienced scientists. The book will be launched on 27 September 2019. You can find more information, including ordering at Edward Elgar Publishing (https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/a-research-agenda-for-sustainable-tourism) or at Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Research-Agenda-Sustainable-Tourism-Agendas/dp/1788117093/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=research+agenda+for+sustainable+tourism&qid=1567348640&s=gateway&sr=8-1).

And watch for a new Facebook page when this book launches!

Webinar on Over Tourism in National Parks and Protected Areas Released!

One result of the essays on the notion of Over Tourism was a Webinar sponsored in part by the Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group of IUCN, the PUP Global Heritage Consortium and the 10YFP of the UN. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BPw-pwNM7Y. If you watch, please hit the Like button. Thanks!

What is Overtourism and What Can We Do About It

Part V

This series of essays has been designed to bring some order to the dialogue about what is now referred to, principally in Europe, I think, by the term Overtourism. Certainly, the concerns are well founded. However, as professionals we bear a special responsibility to clarify, deliberate and respond. Overtourism may, at its simplistic be a peak loading issue, but is likely far more challenging, enduring and complex than we currently imagine.

So what have we learned? First, we need agreement, at least at a general level of what overtourism is, and that is why I suggested a working definition. Clarification means that we communicate with intention and an explicitness that moves dialogue forward. And it also means we are efficient in our communication.

Second, we need to understand the context before we act. This context is specific to each protected area, although the variables may be similar. And we know that at a broad level, this context is one of complexity, uncertainty, change, and often one of conflict. We need to understand this complexity before we apply simple, and many times, simplistic responses (for a good discussion of this for protected areas see https://www.academia.edu/11847185/Benefitting_from_Complexity_thinking).

Third, we need to act upon conceptually sound principles, of visitor management principles derived from science and experience. Those principles exist, and application of them can lead to innovative ideas and clarity about management actions.

Fourth, a framework of which there are several, including the new Interagency Visitor Use Management Framework which is referred to earlier, help us “work through” complicated challenges. These frameworks have been applied in a variety of situations and work where there is an organizational committment to see them through.

Fifth, we need to think more holistically about our planning. I did not write much about this, but our planning in general is not working well because our mental models (basically a science based, expert driven paradigm) of conventional planning is built upon assumptions that are no longer valid.

And finally, we need to build the managerial capacity to function in the context of complexity, change and uncertainty. Our capacity to manage visitation and tourism is very limited. There are few opportunities for continuing education and training in our field. I have facilitated several of these. But we need more. Just a few dozen managers receive training in visitor management each year as near as I can determine—mid level decision makers who must translate policy dictates into operational programs have few opportunities. While this need is recognized by WCPA (https://www.academia.edu/2338522/Building_the_Capability_to_Manage_Tourism_as_Support_for_the_Aichi_Target) there seems to be little international leadership in developing courses aimed at mid-level tourism and visitation managers. I hope I am wrong, please list courses you know of. Perhaps this is a role for TAPAS.

In sum, we are confronted with a great challenge, of providing opportunities for high quality visitor experiences (which are at the foundation of connecting people with nature) while ensuring negative impact to values protected is maintained at acceptable levels and while attempting to build resilience in local communities. Are we going to do something about overtourism or are we going to stand at the sidelines? If we do something, what shall we do as professionals?

What is Overtourism and What Can We Do About It?

Part IV

I concluded the last part by proposing a tentative definition of what Overtourism is, and now I will turn to presenting a starting point to addressing it. In this Part, and the concluding Part, I will cite some literature, most of it accessible, but written in English. Few people write about management of visitation and tourism in protected areas, so nearly all of what I cite is my own work and that of close colleagues. I invite others to add to this work in responses to these essays.

To address Overtourism, a number of things are needed. We need a set of principles which underlie planning and management actions, and we need a framework to help us build our situational awareness and help apply critical thinking skills (see for example https://www.academia.edu/3612776/A_Heuristic_Framework_for_Reflecting_on_Protected_Areas_and_Their_Stewardship_in_the_21st_Century). Of course, we will also need to reflect upon our own mental models of the situation and recognize that we can benefit from complexity thinking (https://www.academia.edu/11847185/Benefitting_from_Complexity_thinking). We need to plan more holistically, as Jon Kohl and I noted in the Future has Other Plans.

Today, I am going focus on principles and frameworks, but this will be very brief. For about 30 years, I have operating on a number of visitor management “principles” (they are probably more like insights than princples, but principles sounds better!). They have been derived from research and professional experience with visitor management, and they have been written in such a way as to cross types of protected areas, marine, terrestrial, cultural, natural, local parks as well as World Heritage Sites. These 11 principles are stated in Table 1. I will only discuss one of them, but you can read short summaries here (https://www.academia.edu/941160/Protected_Area_Planning_Principles_and_Strategies).

I will not say much more about these principles here, but would like to demonstrate Principle 4, impacts are inevitable consequences of visitor use. Research on the use/impact relationship by such scientists as David Cole, Yu-Fai Leung and Jeff Marion (see for example, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeffrey_Marion/publication/251808453_Recreation_Impacts_and_Management_in_Wilderness_A_State-of-Knowledge_Review/links/552414cc0cf2caf11bfcbf37.pdf) shows that a little bit of initial use leads to a disproportionae amount of impact the relationship looks like this, schematically with use level on the X axis and impact on the Y axis

The nature of this relationship means that where we already experience high levels of use, we will have high levels of impacts, and reducing use (and only use) will have little impact. This is true in both the biophysical and social domains. For example, the visitation at Yellowstone National Park is currently over 4 million visits per year, way to the right side of this graphic. It has a certain infrastructure that will not change even if use drops to 2 million or less visitors. The impacts of past decisions are here to stay, absent some major systemic level decision.

The graph also shows that focus of decisions ought to be ( and I respectfully suggest this) on the Y axis, the amount of impact that is acceptable. Since the curve that is in the graph is an average, there is variability around it. That variability means that factors other than use level influence impact, things such as visitor behavior, type of use, season of use, soils, visitor expectations and motivations and so on. For example on my recent family visit to Yellowstone. I knew visitation would be high, so my expectation were more in terms of family togetherness and learning, and viewing landscapes, and lots of bison than having the park to myself.

This graph also means that spreading use more evenly, sometimes advocated by protected area managers and academics is probably not the best strategy for minimizing impacts.

Finally, in this brief essay, we can think where we set the standard, at what point on the Y axis and how we make the decision and how that decision is made. Important questions about the role of science and public engagement.

Lets turn to frameworks for managing visitation and providing opportunities for quality visitor experiences. There are several, including but not limited to the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, Limits of Acceptable Change, Visitor Experience and Resource Protection, Tourism Optimization and Management Model. They were mainly developed to respond to a carrying capacity approach which has failed both in theory and practice (for a short overview, see https://www.academia.edu/22773434/Rethinking_Carrying_Capacity). Each of these are described here, which was originally written for American protected area managers, so the first couple of chapters may not be that informative for many (https://www.academia.edu/394989/An_assessment_of_frameworks_useful_for_public_land_recreation_planning). Warning, this last document is more of a book than a short article.

Recently, the federal land management agencies in the U.S. have put together an Interagency Visitor Use Management Process, which was the subject of two TAPAS sponsored webinars. I think this would also be a good starting point for discussions about what we can do about overtourism, although again, several of the components are related only to U.S. policy and law. Read about it here: https://visitorusemanagement.nps.gov/VUM/Framework.

An important note: the frameworks here are not answers or solutions. What they do is help guide us through the critical thinking needed to address the challenges of managing visitors in protected areas. They are process oriented. Those who apply them use their own special knowledge of a local protected area and apply that in the frameworks.

What is Overtourism and What to Do About It?

Part III

I am one of the most fortunate people around. In my career, I have worked with many different protected area managers and members of the public. I know many of them, most of them actually, to be amazing people doing great work to protect incredible places under often difficult circumstances. Their passion is nature and they are eager to learn. Both are prerequisites for working in the complex, uncertain and changing times of the 21^st century.

Learning is critical to success. And yet, we all carry around with us mental models that interfere with our learning. At the same time, diving deeper to understand and then change our mental models about managing visitor use and tourism is necessary because that is where our greatest leverage point for change lies. Lloyd Gardner in his comment on the TAPAS group List Serve  got at this when he noted that “Maybe we should consider the issue of overcrowding from the perspective of impact instead of cause.” Lloyd has suggested changing the mental model or question we ask which is very, very important.

Fundamentally, the question we face in managing visitors and tourism is “How much impact is acceptable or appropriate?” There are two parts to addressing this question. Part 1 is where science comes in, in establishing the relationship between visitation (and all aspects, not just numbers of visitors) and amount of impact, both biophysical and social. Its where we spend most of our resources when thinking about management, bringing in the scientist to tell us what to do. But the role of science is limited, because of Part 2, which is to make a value judgment about how impact is acceptable. That judgment must consider the science, yes, but also the trade-offs inherent in deciding if the maximum acceptable impact is higher or lower. Making that value judgment requires that all kinds constituencies be engaged to negotiate how much change we are willing to tolerate.

Now the term negotiate may seem terrible to some of you. But we are already doing this, and have done so since our genes came together to produce homo sapiens. We decide, often implicitly, and even subconciously, when environmental conditions are too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet, too barren, when there are too many predators that might eat us, or when there are not enough animals to support us. We respond by discussing the situation and changing our behavior. We have done this. In a more contemporary sense, we do this when developing standards for air pollution, water quality, acceptable unemployment rates, even when reading essays published on the internet (is this essay exciting enough, informative enough? If not we go elsewhere.)

When dealing with publicly managed resources, such as protected areas it is important to engage the constituencies impacted by them and their management. This is one reason behind the interest in connecting people with nature, to create a sense of ownership.

In terms of protected areas and the notion of overtourism, at the foundation is the values that are being protected, but also the visitor’s experience. We are pretty familiar with the biophysical values, but at the heart of the overtourism dialogue is deep concern about a visitor’s experience and also about what is happening in the local community and its residents (e.g., discussions about tourism in Venice).

Now sitting in a 2km long traffic jam in Yellowstone National Park is not my ideal visitor experience, nor I would estimate, the desired visitor experience of all the other visitors in that bison jam. But it is a trade-off you may have to make if you want to see the park in late July. But without a vision, without a statement of the desired conditions and experience, we simply don’t know, as managers, if we are being successful, because we have no explict presentation of acceptable conditions. (I note that managers will apply their personal standards of acceptable change but that is done implicitly and without the benefit of public review, deliberation and discussion.)

By visitor experience, I mean the kind of social-psychological benefits of participating in an activity within a particular setting. Things such as appreciating nature and scenery, learning about nature, challenge, a sense of adventure, escape, solitude, family cohesiveness, and so on. Not all these dimensions are equally important in every situation these and many other dimensions are potentially operative.

I would argue that overtourism occurs when conditions on the ground (e.g., visitor numbers, bison jams, visitor behavior) exceed our limit of acceptable change or our ability to receive the experience we seek, or management seeks to facilitate. It may also occur if conditions in communities fundamentally change its ability to function as a community its residents desire. And it might occur when negative impacts occur that are not acceptable to the values being protected. Maybe this is just a working definition and needs some improvement, maybe a lot of improvement.

What is Overtourism and What Can We Do About It?

Part II

Recognizing and agreeing that there is a problem is the first step to its resolution, understanding and framing the problem and its context comes along later, and still much later do we get to identifying resolutions (not solutions, as I will mention later) that we can propose and implement. I mentioned yesterday some dimensions of the challenge of tourism and visitor management in protected areas. So lets take a look.

The first dimension we need to understand is that that we live in a world of complexity, change and uncertainty, a world of turbulence, and a world of conflict. This context means we can no longer assume predictability and we must assume surprises happen, and that we must manage adaptively. This context means that we need planning processes, which are the processes to resolve problems, that are based on sound critical thinking and principles, and must be learning and consensus building focused. Since the world is everchanging, problems do not stay solved because their context is always changing; so the best we can do is to find responses to those problems that we can build a consensus around. These problems are also wicked and messy, technical terms proposed by systems thinkers such as Russell Ackoff, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. Wicked and messy problems are those for which no correct answer exists, which are connected to other problems and for which we need new approaches to planning.

Tourism and visitor management are not exceptions to the above context. Tourism is connected to many other social and environmental challenges and opportunities, such as economic opportunity and poverty alleviation; its revenues can be used to sustain traditional cultural events or practices, fund protected area management, or support access to health and education. At the same time, the social and environmental consequences of tourism, like every other area of human activity, can be negative, such as pollution, biophysical impact, conflict with locals over behavior norms or competition for favorite locations and so on. The negative social consequences of tourism are particularly intricate and thorny and require lots of attention for their resolution. This does not say tourism is bad per se, but that we recognize that tourism has both positives and negatives and both must be managed.

At the same time, when we look at problems of “overtourism” the first place we should look is in the mirror. We, speaking generally about academics, non-governmental organizations and management, are often the cause of problems we face because of programs and resolutions implemented in the past and in the theories we espouse. When we promote a park, without a corresponding management program in place, overtourism results (please note: our understanding of marketing among the protected area community is limited, promotion is only one part of marketing, which is making connections between people and places for experiences to occur).

(And by the way, if you are interested, these ideas are discussed in a new book authored by my colleague Jon Kohl and myself, The Future has Other Plans, published by Fulcrum Publishing.)

Do we ask: Are the management systems in place to take facilitate quality visitor experiences? Are we prepared for surprises? What is our vision of tourism and visitor use? What is our mission in implementing this vision? What are the fundamental princples upon which our tourism and visitor management program based? What have we done in the past that has lead to problems, and what have we learned from that?

Finally, and this statement may be controversial to many, conservation has beed framed as principally a biological problem when it is actually a political one. As a result, visitor and tourism management have not been at the forefront of planning and management, (neither has working with communities dependent upon resources within protected areas, building consensus around practical, implementable actions, working with constituencies to create a sense of ownership in the protected area and plan, or building trust). This conventional framing of conservation is not bad, but in the 21^st century, it is not necessarily effective.

Our mental models of conservation and management of tourism and visitor use need to change to something more appropriate and useful. Wicked problems and messy situations will continue, surprises will happen, relationships between people and nature will change, in mostly unpredictable ways.

A bit more on this next time, then we will get more specific about managing tourism and visitor use.

What is Overtourism and What Can We Do About It?

Recently, there has been growing mention in the social media about "Overtourism" and its negative consequences. 

First, I want to say that I have never heard this word before, so I am not sure what it means. So, looked it up on the internet and found a few references to it. Even this:

So, as there has been since the 1950s actually, when in the U.S., the Christian Science Monitor (a newspaper) published a series of articles about how American national were being “loved to death” there is continuing concern about the quantity of tourism, as there should be, for reasons I will describe. (I have to note that 60 years later the parks are still here, and have not died.)

So a bit of background first. I have just returned from visiting Yellowstone (one of the overtourists, I believe I am ) with my family and which has been cited as one of the places receiving such high amounts of visitation that we should be concerned. This happened during the absolutely most visited period of time (last part of July first part of August). There were probably over 30,000 visitors in the park during those days. And yes, the park was congested. At one point, we experienced a “bison jam”, cars stopped on the road because of a heard of bison, that was perhaps 2 km long. Now there were two reasons for the cars being stopped. First, there were occasionally bison blocking the road, and between a car and a bison, the bison wins. Second, people stopped their cars on the road to photograph the bison. Now this latter reason was most likely the cause of the bison jam, that is, not the number of cars, but rather the people driving the cars, in disregard of an infinite number of messages from the National Park Service to not stop the car on the road. So, the bison jam was a function of behavior more so than numbers of cars. So was there “too much tourism?”

The answer is “I don’t know”.

Some more background. I have been studying and working with protected area managers on visitor management and tourism issues for about 50 years, yes, 50 years. I started my graduate studies focusing on issues of biophysical impacts and then moved on to social science side of things, because it became clear to me that side of management was very challenging, thorny, if you will, and hardly any one paid any attention to visitors, except to complain there were too many. Even then.

I have visited Yellowstone many times since 1970, 5 times in the last year. Some trips were for business, others for holiday (I am very fortunate, I live 400 km from Yellowstone). But even on holidays, visiting Yellowstone required some thinking about what was happening.

Part of the challenge we have in addressing the question of visitation management is its complexity, part of the problem is that the problem has often been caused by solutions implemented in the past, and part of the problem is that we have ignored tourism and visitation management in our conservation programs. That may sound harsh to many of you. But the reality is that we devote few resources to designing public use plans, fewer to implementing them, and fewer still to building managerial capacity. The latter several of us wrote about in 2012 in the December issue of Parks.

For example, how many general management plans devote more than a few pages to managing tourism and visitation? How many have developed a vision of what public use should look like? How many have standards of acceptable change? How many have defined what a good visitor experience would be? How many monitor those experiences?

If we don’t ask these questions, we cannot answer the question if there is too much tourism, at least as professionals.

I will conclude now, but will write again shortly on how we can better frame the opportunity we have in managing visitation and tourism.

Steve

Building Resilience—A New Way of Thinking about Sustainable Tourism

In our recent book, Reframing Sustainable Tourism, Keith Bosak lay out the idea of resilience—the capacity of a system to adapt to disturbances—as a goal of sustainable tourism to replace the notion of a Triple Bottom Line, which has dominated technical and academic discourse over the last 30 years or so. To provide some additional perspective, we will broadcast live a Google Hangout on this topic on Thursday, 14 April at 11 AM U.S. Mountain Daylight Time. You can view the Hangout live, or view it any other time at this URL:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV_e_r-dWSw.

You can purchase the book on Amazon.com or you can go the the Springer Publisher website to purchase electronic copies of the entire book or individual chapters: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9789401772082 .

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?