The Protected Landscape Approach - Centre for Mediterranean ...

The Protected Landscape Approach: Linking Nature, Culture and Community
ship; team skills; inter-personal skills; communication; presentation; facilitation; consensusbuilding;
conflict resolution; monitoring and evaluation; networking; and business and ac -
count ing. These generic skills are just as essential to protected landscape management as the
scientific/technical skills, as they provide the foundation for working with people in defining
and accomplishing conservation goals. It is these skills that are critical to generating the
political will and community support that are now regarded as essential for effective con -
servation.
In protected landscape management, the director’s role, in particular, is one of leadership
and co-ordination of a very broad compass of management and planning functions that embrace
many disciplines and involve a number of people from diverse levels and sections of society.
He/she thus has to be a “specialist generalist”, with sufficient knowledge of each of the
specialist functions to understand why, when, how and by whom, particular activities need to
take place, and how they fit into the overall scheme of things. He/she also needs excellent
leadership, team-building and organizational skills; negotiation skills; communication skills,
conflict resolution and consensus-building skills. Critically, he/she also needs to build and to
lead a highly skilled and committed team.
Identifying training needs
At both regional and international levels, a number of useful efforts have been, and continue to
be made to identify training needs in protected area management. Significantly, these initiatives
all identify as a priority those skills associated with the protected landscape approach. For
example, in 1993, a Protected Area Conservation Strategy (PARCS) survey assessed and
evaluated the training needs and opportunities of 200 protected area managers in 16 countries
throughout Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. This assessment concluded that the greatest
need expressed by protected area managers across the region was for organizational training in
policy development techniques and procedures, business management skills, and programme/
project evaluation skills and techniques (AWF, 1993). In 1997, the South Pacific Regional
Environment Programme (SPREP) also made an assessment of skill and knowledge re -
quirements within its region, for the purpose of capacity-building. Here again, a number of
generic skills were identified as those of highest priority in terms of organizational training
needs. They include, for example, project design and proposal writing, personal planning and
work programming, communication, facilitation, presentation, budgeting, financial manage -
ment, marketing, monitoring and evaluation.
In South-East Asia, the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity Conservation (ARCBC) adopted an
alternative approach to addressing concerns regarding the training needs and management
capacities of protected areas in the region. In order to capture the diversity of experiences in the
region, the Centre devised a system of occupational competencies (Appleton, 2002), based on a
framework of 24 typical (for the region) protected area jobs. Within this framework, 16
categories of protected area activities were identified (Figure 1), calling for a total of 291 skills
(variously required in a range of contexts) and their associated knowledge-base. According to
the skills and knowledge requirement, occupational standards were agreed for up to five
staffing levels within each category.
224