TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out (Jeffrey Sayer) 1 Locating and designing an ecologically representative network of forest protected areas Towards a Framework for Implementing a Representative System of Forest Protected Areas 13 (Bob Pressey) The National Protected Area System Plan in Madagascar (Martin Nicoll, Rasolofo Louis 31 Andriamahaly, Brigitte Carr-Dirick) Economic Design Principles for Forest Protected Areas (Amar Inamdar) 43 Ecological aspects of design WWF-Canada's Endangered Spaces Campaign (Arlin Hackman) 57 Protected Area System Planning in Lao PDR (Klaus Berkmuller) 73 Integrating forest protected areas within national development strategies Integrating Forest Protected Areas within National Development Strategies (Thomas McShane 87 and Gonzalo Oviedo) Is it Always Right to Kill the Goose? Or IUCN Categories V and VI versus community based 89 resource management (Antoine Leclerc and Baptiste Noël Randrianandianina) The Tropical Forestry Action Programme - lessons from Ethiopia and Zambia (Ermias Bekele) 101 Balancing Wildlife Conservation with Local Use when Designing Protected Area Systems in 119 Tropical Forests (Elizabeth Bennett) People and Totally Protected Areas in Sarawak (Oswald Braken Tisen and Elizabeth Bennett) 129 Economic sustainability of forest protected areas ANGAP’s Approach to a Sustainable Future (Antoine Leclerc and Tiana Razafimahatratra) 139 Real World Conservation: Combining Biological, Economic and Social Criteria in Planning a 147 National System of Forest Nature Reserves for Uganda (Peter Howard) Nature Tourism and Protected Area Pricing: Lessons learned from Africa (Wolf Krug) 159 Parastatal Governance of State Protected Areas in Africa and the Caribbean (Alexander James, 175 Sam Kanyamibwa and Michael Green) Assessing management effectiveness of forest protected areas Caring for the Assets – the Effectiveness of Protected Areas Management (Adrian Phillips) 189 The WCPA Management Effectiveness Framework – Where to from here? (Marc Hockings, 205 Nigel Dudley and Sue Stolton) Meeting global information and reporting needs Managing and Applying Information on Protected Area Management Effectiveness at Global and 215 Regional Levels: The Role of WCMC and WCPA (Jeremy Harrison and Marc Hockings) Page Maintaining the Integrity of Natural World Heritage Sites (Bing Lucas) 227 Site Conservation Planning - A Framework for Developing and Measuring the Impact of Effective 241 Biodiversity Conservation Strategies (Jeffrey Parrish) The Use of Certification of Sustainable Management Systems and their Possible Application to 259 Protected Area Management (Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley) Institutional and utilization issues for assessment systems Institutionalizing Assessments within Protected Area Management Regimes (Robbie Robinson) 269 Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Areas (Jamie Ervin) 277 Management Effectiveness and Institutional Credibility – Assessment of Management 289 Effectiveness of Protected Areas in Finland (Stig Johansson) NGOs and PA Management Agencies Working Together to Assess Protected Area Effectiveness; Successes, Problems and Prospects - the Experience of WWF-Brazil (Rosa 303 Lemos de Sá, Nurit Bensusan, Leandro Ferreira) Evaluate, Change and Propagate – Three Steps to Better Parks (Fiona Leverington and Terry 311 Harper) Park Effectiveness in The Tropics (Aaron Bruner, Richard Rice, Ted Gullison and Gustavo 327 Fonseca) Assessing management effectiveness of protected areas at the site level Implementation of a Framework to Monitor the Management of Protected Areas in Central 333 America (José Courrau) Management Effectiveness of the Dja Reserve, Cameroon (Elie Hakizumwami) 341 Outcomes-based Evaluation of Management for Protected Areas – a Methodology for 349 Incorporating Evaluation into Management Plans (Glenys Jones) PAN Parks – Well-managed Protected Areas Ideal for Sustainable Tourism (Harri Karjalainen) 359 Foreword Human impact is so considerable, and there are so many links between the biosphere and the atmosphere – in both directions – that it is clear that the only course is to manage them jointly. The role of forests is large in that equation, not just in terms of the global carbon cycle, but also in terms of biological diversity. They also play critical roles in ecosystem services such as watershed management, erosion and flood control as well as disaster prevention. So the Forest Protected Areas Initiative represents a global conservation priority of the highest order. A key element in the initiative is the goal of protection of at least 10% of the world’s forest types. Ambitious as this may sound, it is also insufficient. Species-area curves tell us that in the end 10% would conserve only 50% of the species in the forests. In addition, if there is no other forest other than that in protected areas, it would be impossible to ward off the demands for the many products and services forests provide. So the art of the exercise will rest on managing entire forested landscapes in ways which engage the local communities and provide basic human needs while at the same time providing a haven for forest biological diversity. It also means improving management of existing parks where the presence of government is thin to nonexistent. At the same time it is important not to concentrate on improved management at the expense of creating important new protected areas. Opportunities to do the latter are rare, fleeting and may never come again. So it is important to think boldly, although not to the point of foolishness. Based squarely on past experience of what works and what does not, this initiative comes just in the nick of time. In contrast, the benefits will last for countless generations. Thomas E. Lovejoy 175 Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out Jeffrey Sayer Abstract Extensive areas of forest in the tropics have been legally classified as protected areas; however, in many cases it has been difficult to achieve their conservation. This paper argues that the priority for forest conservation should not be to maximize the area totally protected but rather to focus on improved management effectiveness. The keys to improved management will be greater clarity in defining objectives and a greater commitment to finding locally appropriate conservation approaches. This in turn will suggest that a portfolio of different approaches to forest protection will have a higher chance of success than maximizing the area allocated to arbitrary international frameworks. Practical realities will dictate that the portfolio will include a range of options from elite sites given exemplary protection through to well-managed multiple- use areas where protection and use are balanced. I will argue that in tropical countries with large populations of poor people multiple-use areas will have an especially valuable role to play. An “ecosystem approach” to the management of these areas is proposed and practical ways to develop this approach are suggested. An ecosystem approach will require that conservation agencies move away from “command and control” management and adopt output-based systems based on effective collaboration between all stakeholders. Jeffrey Sayer Director General Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Bogor INDONESIA Tel: +62 251 622 622 Fax: +62 251 622 100 email: [email protected] 176 Forest Protected Areas: Time is Running Out Jeffrey Sayer INTRODUCTION This paper will focus on the problems of conserving natural areas in the less developed countries of the tropics. It will deal particularly with the problems of conserving forests. This is partly because forests are by far the dominant terrestrial ecosystems in these countries, but also because these are the systems whose conservation has attracted most international attention. The conservation community repeatedly claims that more money is needed for forest conservation. The contention of this paper is that it is equally important to make better use of those resources that are already available. After several decades of international action to conserve wild nature in tropical developing countries we are still losing ground. The Global Environment Facility and several major development assistance agencies have channelled billions of dollars towards conservation, yet even the sites that have been the targets of this expenditure often remain in danger (for instance see Wells et al. 1999). I will argue that there are major weaknesses in the conceptual underpinnings of many international conservation programmes. In particular the following generic problems: • Attention has focused on establishing global targets for conservation, for instance to conserve 10 per cent of all forests, but clarity in defining the objectives of these areas is often lacking. Rigorously defined measures of the desired outcomes of conservation programmes are surprisingly rare (Wells et al. 1999). • Little is invested in learning from the experiences of our attempts to achieve conservation action on the ground. The sort of information that would be of practical value to the field manager is difficult to access. • Attempts to define global conservation programmes are often insensitive to local interests and costs. We espouse the principles of local involvement and participation, but we often make unfounded assumptions about where the interests of local people really lie. • Investments have been made in building capacity for sophisticated, “big-picture” conservation professionals. Little has been done to develop capacity for practical conservation action on the ground. There is a lack of practical conservation field practitioners. Conservation needs its equivalent to the “bare-foot doctors” who have helped address health problems in the developing world. • Attention has focused on a few simple models for conservation management – the North American National Park model – and not enough in a diversity approach adapted to local political, social, economic and biophysical conditions. • We make unwarranted assumptions about what will work in practice. In particular, we try to transport solutions that have worked in a certain economic or political setting to totally different conditions. We ignore the realities of processes of social learning. 177 GLOBALLY SIGNIFICANT SITES AND THE WORLD HERITAGE CONVENTION We still need global monitoring, internationally accepted standards for managing priority sites, conferences to share our experience, and knowledge and targets to which all countries can subscribe. Indeed CIFOR et al. (1999) and Sayer et al. (in press) have argued for greatly increased international attention to be given to the elite set of forest sites listed under the World Heritage Convention. They argue that this list should be expanded and that significant international resources be mobilized to ensure the integrity of the sites. If this could be achieved then a major proportion of the world’s forest biodiversity would be protected. However these authors also argue that few of these elite conservation sites are pristine forests, undisturbed by humans. In most cases the biodiversity has evolved in the presence of humans for millennia. The objective of conservation should not, therefore, be to exclude people, but to conserve examples of harmonious and sustainable human-forest relations. Zuidema et al. (1997) and Sayer et al. (in press) also argue that caution should be exercised in adding too many sites to protected area systems. There will be diminishing returns if conservation investments are spread over too many sites, especially if many of these sites are viewed as being of less than exemplary value. In this paper I will further develop the hypothesis that the ideal portfolio of conservation areas will consist of a small number of truly outstanding sites – the cornerstones of the system – the World Heritage sites and other national level exemplary areas. But these must be supported by a much larger network of smaller, more highly targeted nature reserves and much larger areas of locally adapted, multiple-use forests. These second order sites will require different types of management institutions and a different culture of “management”. Buffer zone and Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) have broken some of the ground in helping us to understand how locally relevant, multiple-use sites might be operated. One fundamental need for such conservation programmes will be the capacity to make decisions, adapt objectives to meet local realities, interact meaningfully with local stakeholders, and design and achieve locally adapted solutions. They will require the empowerment of local managers within a framework of national-level regulations to ensure equity and the maintenance of non-local benefits. HOW MANY PROTECTED AREAS DO WE NEED? Other things being equal it would be best for biodiversity conservation to maximize the number and extent of pristine, totally protected areas. Unfortunately all other things are not equal. The number and extent of protected areas that is feasible and desirable will differ between a poor country with a large population and little remaining natural habitat and a richer country with fewer people and large remaining natural areas. The extent to which protected areas incur costs for local people has been widely under-estimated. In reality many of the benefits of strict protection accrue to the global community whilst the costs are met by local people. When these local people are already poor the injustice of the situation becomes apparent. Many acute and intransigent conservation problems occur in areas where large populations of poor people are putting pressure on declining areas of forests and other natural systems. Unfortunately global patterns of population growth and resource use suggest that these situations are likely to become more widespread in the future. This 178 suggests that we have to be far more pragmatic in our attitude to conservation in these situations. We cannot conserve everything and we have to make choices. Surely it makes sense for a major criterion in making these choices to be the maintenance of future options. And surely the best way of achieving this is to protect the broadest range of components of the natural systems. Perhaps the vast pristine national parks located in remote frontier areas of developing countries should receive less attention in our conservation programmes. More attention should be given to strategically located, smaller, highly targeted nature reserves spread more broadly throughout the landscape and including a relatively high density of small sites in the more densely populated areas (Zuidema et al. 1997, Corbet and Turner 1996). Many of these sites will inevitably be highly modified by human activity. This does not diminish their value for conservation but it may indicate that the intensity of conservation management will need to be high. The viability of small, modified nature reserves will be highly dependent on the nature of surrounding land uses. Conservation programmes in these situations will require a good understanding of linkages and interactions at the landscape level. Conservation programmes for Java, Vietnam, Thailand, large parts of China, coastal West Africa, and the Andean mountains, should probably have more in common with the carefully managed nature reserves of the United Kingdom or the multiple use “parcs naturels” of France than with the vast wilderness parks of the western USA. If one accepts the hypothesis that for much of the tropical developing world it will be difficult to defend large pristine wilderness areas, then it is axiomatic that much conservation will have to be achieved in various sorts of multiple-use managed natural systems. Trees on farmlands, riparian woodland strips, forests where timber harvesting is subject to restrictions to favour biodiversity etc, will all be important instruments for conservation. Conservation programmes on this model will require quite different institutions and management capacity to the para-military command and control cultures of traditional conservation agencies. They will require a greater degree of devolution of decision making than has been common in the past. Local conservation programmes will have to be tailored to local needs and negotiated with local stakeholders. Conservation professionals will have to have the independence to make agreements with local people and the judgement to decide upon the trade-offs between local needs and national-level conservation objectives. Success must be defined in terms of quality of management rather than on the basis of the extent of the area legally protected. MULTIPLE-USE INTEGRATED PROTECTED AREAS OR STRICTLY PROTECTED SEGREGATED SYSTEMS Most conservation investments in developing countries focus on strictly protected areas in IUCN’s categories l, ll and lll (strict nature reserves, national parks etc.). In industrialized countries we give far more attention to achieving conservation objectives as a secondary objective in a broad range of land-use situations. Thus most of the forest biodiversity of Europe is conserved in forests that are managed for timber and recreation. There is probably no single correct answer to the question of where the balance of these approaches should lie. Temperate and boreal forest systems have been subject to greater climatic perturbations in recent millennia than forests in the tropics. Their biodiversity may therefore have a greater inherent ability to tolerate disturbance than some tropical forests. But the biological specificity of tropical 179 forests may have been exaggerated in the conservation literature. Some recent research suggests that the managed landscape mosaics, typical of protected areas in some European countries, would be a good model for the tropics. A more important determinant of the best approach may be the strength of conservation institutions and of civil society in general, rather than the ecology of the forests themselves. The literature has been dominated by debates about whether “sustainable forest management” or “strict protection” is the best approach for tropical forests. In countries with weak legal systems, poorly developed land ownership regimes, large populations of poor landless people and a high level of corruption, it will be difficult to make either approach to conservation work in the short term. In these situations, the conservation portfolio should probably be heavily biased towards damage limitation at the most important locations, accompanied by heavy investments in the development of a local conservation constituency. The proposed set of Social Criteria and Indicators (C&I) for Protected Areas in Table 1 (CIFOR, 1999) may be more valuable measures of progress than the biophysical measures that are more commonly used. Table 1. Proposed Social C&I for Protected Areas P.1. PROTECTED AREA MANAGEMENT MAINTAINS OR ENHANCES FAIR INTERGENERATIONAL ACCESS TO RESOURCES AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS C.1.1 Local management is effective in controlling maintenance of, and access to, the protected area resources C.1.2 Forest actors have a reasonable share in the economic benefits derived from protected area use and management C.1.3 People link their and their children’s future with good management of local resources P.2. CONCERNED STAKEHOLDERS HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED RIGHTS AND MEANS TO MANAGE PROTECTED AREAS COOPERATIVELY AND EQUITABLY C.2.1 Effective mechanisms exist for two-way communication related to protected area management among stakeholders C.2.2 Local stakeholders have detailed, reciprocal knowledge pertaining to local resource use (including user groups and gender roles), as well as protected area management plans prior to implementation C.2.3 Agreement exists on rights and responsibilities of relevant stakeholders P.3. THE HEALTH OF THE LOCAL PEOPLE, CULTURES AND THE PROTECTED AREA ARE ACCEPTABLE TO ALL STAKEHOLDERS C.3.1 There is a recognizable balance between human activities and environmental conditions C.3.2 The relationship between forest management and human health is recognized C.3.3 The relationship between forest maintenance and human culture is acknowledged as important Adapted and excerpted from CIFOR Generic Template, 1999. INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGMENTS FOR MULTIPLE-USE LANDSCAPES Conservation programmes dependent on a complex array of local interactions and negotiations will clearly require different governance structures and staffing skills than those focused on the protection of a small number of large sites. Local management of complex conservation programmes will require a higher intensity of 180 interactions with local governments and resource users and less use of central government fiat to impose regulations. The complex and somewhat bureaucratic structures for managing the “national parks” of France and England may be even more difficult to establish in poorer tropical countries than simpler, centralized “Parks Departments”. We still have a lot to learn about the implications of devolved and decentralized governance structures for resource management in poorer countries. Current work by CIFOR to develop tools for adaptive-collaborative management (ACM) of forests should contribute to this. Much can be learned from projects to develop community management of resources. Joint Forest Management in India, some of the more innovative Integrated Conservation and Development Programs (ICDPs), for instance the Leuser Project in Indonesia and longer standing programmes such as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania can teach us many lessons. Perhaps some of the most striking conclusions to be drawn from experience in this area are: • Central governments cannot abdicate all authority, if they do then conservation attributes of national or global importance will be lost. • If large numbers of local stakeholders are going to be empowered to manage resources then the credibility, authority, transparency and professionalism of “intermediate organizations” acquires great importance. • Long-term success will almost always require financial incentives or compensation for those local stakeholders who forego resource use in the interests of resource conservation. A set of more general principles, developed by Elinor Ostrom from the University of Indiana for the management of common property resources, may have broad application for the management of complex landscape mosaics, even if none of the areas concerned are strictly under “common property” regimes. • There are clearly defined boundaries: both of the resource and who may appropriate it. • Appropriation and provision rules are tailored to local conditions. • The resource users who must abide by appropriation rules have a role in making them. • Monitors are accountable to, or are, the appropriators. • Sanctions for non-compliance are enforceable, and graduated by severity of offence. • Low-cost, local mechanisms are available for conflict resolution. • Government recognizes the local right to organize institutions. • Resource producers, managers and beneficiaries are the same people. • Resource management functions are devolved to the lowest level of social organization at which they can be performed properly. • Marketing and resource sales are open and competitive. • Management represents cooperation between local people, the private sector, and government, with government retaining ultimate authority over natural resources. 181