1.Front section - IUCN

A taxonomy of support: how and why new constituencies are supporting protected areas 1
© Jeffrey A. McNeely
government officials view environmental NGOs –
particularly those that engage in advocacy work – as
foes of economic development and unwelcome
monitors of environmental and human rights abuses.
At the same time, some government agencies have
found it useful to cooperate with NGOs in designing
and implementing conservation projects since
government agencies often have less relevant
experience and operational flexibility. NGOs at the
national level can better target the services they
provide with personal knowledge of their clientele,
and many donors have found the NGO sector to be
more flexible, easier to monitor, more responsive to
their needs, and less encumbered with politics than the
public sector (Meyer, 1997).
Carrying out research in Indonesia
The contributions of NGOs will need to expand to
meet growing demands. They especially need to find
ways of working in partnership with many other
interest groups, especially the private sector (as
sources of funds, influence, and expertise), local
communities (as those with the most immediate
interests being affected), and governments (as those
holding sovereignty over land and resources). For
example, NGOs could become more effective by
strengthening their capacity for working with the
private sector through establishing partnerships with
private sector actors with a proven track record in
tourism, genetic resources, and small-scale
sustainable enterprise, both national and international.
NGOs are important stakeholders in protected area
discussions, but do not provide the single ultimate
answer. In order to enhance their contribution, many
NGOs need help in strengthening their capacity in
project administration and management, as well as in
the kinds of expertise relevant to modern protected
areas. Numerous examples of NGO support are
available to provide lessons to learn, adapt, and
replicate, but our book is emphasising “new” or
under-utilized constituencies so the NGO sector is not
given as high a profile as it might deserve.
Involving universities and
research institutions
Research and monitoring are critical parts of protected
area management. Successful policy making requires
continuous feedback from field-level resource
management activities, through monitoring
ecosystem structures and processes and various
indicators of human welfare so that the results of
management actions can be compared against
expectations of the plans that led to the actions.
Results from monitoring programmes must be made
available to planners, managers, policy makers, and
scientists so that they can adjust plans, management
actions, policies and research programmes, thereby
creating a loop, called “adaptive management”,
between implementing field actions, monitoring the
affected ecosystems and human responses, comparing
the results against expectations, and adjusting future
actions, with each reiteration of activity based on past
experience (Holling, 1978).
Universities and research institutions have been
conducting research in protected areas for many years,
and their work has been especially important in
identifying sites worthy of inclusion within national
systems of protected areas. Their research in
agriculture, botany, forestry, geology, biogeography,
animal behaviour, ecology, rural development,
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