A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

PART I
Community Engagement
to a responsible party (management authority, government agency, community group,
or individual) for implementation. The process enables all concerned stakeholders
to be brought into the discussion of priority management needs and to share among
themselves the burden of protected area management.
It is also a means to focus management planning on the priority issues, whether
these are specific conservation interventions, such as control of exotic species,
installation of moorings, or reforestation, and on aspects of public relations, such as
building community institutions, forums for feedback and dialogue, interpretive
centers, and so on.
The process of issue-action analysis varies greatly according to the situation and
the type of participatory approach (see Box I-7 above). For community-based protected
areas, an interactive approach is used that requires local villagers to identify issues
and actions. For other approaches, where objectives of more national or global
significance dominate, the following process may be more appropriate.
On the basis of field and social surveys, identify the main areas of conservation
value, human use and threats to both. These can be mapped to produce three separate
maps showing the concentrations of conservation values (e.g., reefs, mangroves, and
species feeding, spawning or nesting sites), the concentrations of human uses (e.g.,
fishing, recreation, tourism, bee-keeping, pole cutting, and medicinal plant extraction),
and concentrations of threats to these resources and uses (e.g., turtle or bird egg harvest,
pollution sources, poaching, illegal timber extraction, and illegal fishing). Overlay of
these maps show the locations of potential conflicts (e.g., tourism activities in sensitive
habitats, fishing in critical turtle habitats, and pollution in shellfishing areas). This
defines the geographic scope of issues to be addressed in the management plan, and
is a first cut of the issues to be addressed.
The issue-action analysis extracts the issues identified through the preceding
step and other issues that are not mapable (e.g., deficiencies perceived in the policy,
legal and administrative arrangements for protected areas) to list a series of actions
for each. A practical approach for this is to write the management issue at the top
of a page and list the actions beneath it that are required to resolve the issue. Keep
renumbering the actions into a logical sequence and repeatedly go through the list
while asking the question: Will this lead to resolution of the management issue? If not,
add another action until the final answer is: Almost certainly.
The resulting series of actions can be grouped into a series of themes (e.g., those
relating to policies, legislation, resource use opportunities, creation of special protection
or pursuit zones, and conservation interventions) that form the basis for the
management plan. These steps are summarized in Figure I-37.
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