1.Front section - IUCN

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Friends for Life: New partners in support of protected areas
parties through mutual decision-making, with the
intent for informal resolution wherever possible
(Planning and Conservation Services, 1990).
Involvement of all groups from the beginning
promotes ownership in the process, which in turn
channels energies towards constructive problemsolving
rather than criticism. Joint management
agreements must be clearly stated with no ambiguity
that can lead to divergent interpretations and result in
on-going conflict. Under a joint management
agreement, the management of a protected area must
be completely cooperative, with no decisions being
made without consultation among the two groups.
Where indigenous peoples are joint managers, their
role must be as equal and effective partners on an ongoing
basis, at the upper policy-making management
levels as well as at the field level as rangers. An
advisory committee, composed of native and
government representatives. should reach decisions
by consensus rather than by voting, and allow for
freedom of exchange of experience and knowledge
between the groups. The members of the committee
should try to bring together the concepts of scientific
and indigenous knowledge.
Conclusions
This book has built on the fundamental assumption
that protected areas provide multiple benefits to many
groups of people. Different benefits flow differently to
different people, in different ways. Some of these
benefits are easy to recognise and capture in an
economic sense, such as tourism; others are easy to
recognise but the economic benefits are more difficult
to capture by the protected area, such as watershed
protection; others may require new regulations to
ensure a flow of benefits, such as carbon sequestration
or conservation of genetic resources like wild relatives
of domestic plants; and still others may require new
ways of thinking, such as health, non-material,
spiritual or cultural benefits.
Continuing to provide a stream of benefits may
require some trade-offs, deciding whether to value
long-term benefits over immediate ones, or whether to
provide wide benefits to the general public rather than
financial gain to a select few. This requires clearly
identifying and measuring the multiple flows of
protected area services, developing means to convert
services into support for protected areas, and
negotiating ways to ensure that the distribution of
protected area services among the multiple interest
groups is socially equitable.
It also requires a more complete assessment of the
costs of protected areas, including the costs of
managing the area effectively, renouncing alternative
uses of the land, and controlling problem animals that
may move out of the protected area and cause
economic damage to local people. And perhaps most
important is to address the opportunity costs paid by
the people who live in and around the protected areas
and who are no longer permitted certain forms of land
and resource use. In short, the foundation of support
for protected areas is a sound assessment of costs and
benefits, and their distribution.
Building broader support for protected areas also
faces some obstacles. These may involve conflicts
over competing values, for example, choosing to
harvest logs for construction or to maintain trees for
providing habitat to wild species. The effects of
globalization may pit local interests against
international ones, while the effects of
decentralization may distort the relative power of
some interest groups. In some cases, governments
may be reluctant to enable protected areas to collect
payments for the ecosystem services they are
providing, preferring that any income generated goes
to the central treasury instead.
Protected areas are complex systems of land
management, which involve complicated issues and
numerous stakeholders who have different
perspectives on the issues. This book has explored the
principle that protected areas are more likely to
prosper when they have a wide range of supporters –
in political terms, "a broad constituency". This means
giving multiple stakeholders a real interest in
protected areas.
Generating more support from politicians for
protected areas requires convincing them of the
political importance of protected area issues. This in
turn requires that the public be provided with fuller
information about the benefits, both tangible and
intangible, that protected areas provide. Politicians
also need to be provided with evidence to enable them
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