Good practice protected area governance: A framework and case example

Protected area governance concerns the structures, processes and traditions that determine how power and responsibilities are exercised, how decisions are taken, and how stakeholders have their say. Over the last few decades, powers and responsibilities related to protected areas, while still substantially vested in governments and their agencies, have also been taken up by indigenous and local communities, NGOs and individual landholders, often working in partnership with each other. While non-state protected areas are not new – indigenous communities in particular have for millennia instituted protective governance over special places – civil, private and collaborative forms have recently become much more prominent and influential. Recognition of four broad governance types – governance by government, shared governance, private governance and governance by indigenous peoples and local communities – has now been incorporated into revised IUCN guidelines for protected area management categories. This contemporary regime of protected area governance raises pressing issues of appropriateness, design, quality and effectiveness. Establishing and maintaining good governance across diverse ownership and responsibility arrangements is a prerequisite for effective management, and is fundamental to securing political and community support. In this context, assessing governance quality is an important task for both demonstrating performance and identifying where improvement is desirable. In this paper, I will present a framework for assessing governance quality that is based on seven principles – legitimacy, transparency, accountability, inclusiveness, fairness, connectivity and resilience. I will then illustrate application of this framework using case examples from Scotland, Spain, France, India and Australia. These examples encompass government, co-managed and private protected areas.