Governance, Management, and Conservation Success of Protected Areas in Brazil and Colombia.

Abstract

Protected areas are the most widespread policy instrument for the conservation of tropical biodiversity. Over the past decade, the effectiveness of their management has come under increased scrutiny, with donors, governments, non-governmental organizations, and other conservation stakeholders evaluating the management of over 9000 protected areas in 140 countries. Designed to inform the planning, implementation and evaluation of conservation interventions, such evaluations of protected area management effectiveness (PAME) tend to collect data on a wide range of management aspects considered important for protected area success. However, many widespread PAME evaluation methods do not directly measure whether protected areas achieve their conservation goals, and why. Moreover, there is a lack of evidence whether such methods can be used to predict conservation outcomes, and thus obviate their direct measurement. Using the example of tropical protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon and Colombia’s Northeast, this dissertation 1) examines whether the two most widespread PAME evaluation scorecards provide good surrogates for the capacity of protected areas to achieve conservation objectives and 2) identifies factors which are closely associated with protected area performance, and may thus be particularly suitable as performance indicators and, potentially, targets of interventions. Combining remote sensing imagery, management indicator datasets and data from my own field research with a new take on quasi-experimental econometric estimation techniques, my analyses challenge the notion that widespread PAME evaluation methods measure the capacity of tropical forest protected areas to achieve conservation objectives: Indicator scores of the two most widespread PAME evaluation methods failed to predict the success of protected areas in reducing forest fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Furthermore, my results also suggest that that land use rights – their design, clarification and enforcement – are key to understanding and predicting conservation outcomes in tropical protected areas, but tend to be neglected by the most widespread PAME evaluation methods. I conclude that the gap between PAME evaluations and the improvement of conservation performance needs to be narrowed, and propose five directions for research.