Abstract
A community can serve as a force that pushes national parks to realize sustainable development, while community participation is critical to the relationship between national park protection and community development. Therefore, the present study explored the community’s participation in the construction of Wuyishan National Park (hereinafter referred to as the Park) by means of case analysis and qualitative research. The research outcomes showed that the community’s participation was led by the authorities, which is a typical example of “passive participation”. In addition, the governing body of the Park and its communities did not form a sound organization that enabled them to manage and protect the Park in concerted efforts. In other words, they did not work well together, and had not yet established an effective community participation mechanism. Moreover, there were three major problems about the community’s participation in the Park’s governance: The community lacked the ability to take part in it, its participation took limited forms, and it displayed little initiative in the participation. To solve these problems, the present research proposes four mechanisms to improve community participation regarding technological, structural, social, and institutional resilience, i.e., intelligent guidance mechanism, nested organization mechanism, social mobilization mechanism, and institutional guarantee mechanism, respectively.
Highlights
Resilience governance mainly focuses on the tension of the laws and regulations related to community participation in national park governance, which enables community residents to identify relevant provisions on community development and to produce path dependence on national parks economically to promote the occurrence of community participation
Irrespective of the way a community participates in national park governance, the community is often regarded as the one to be managed, so it role is not valued
Its neighboring community residents mainly rely on the tea industry to make a living
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. China clearly proposes to create a nature-protected area system with national parks as the mainstay The establishment of such a system necessitates sticking to the ecological red line, heightening the sense of benefit and happiness of the public, and managing various natural, social, and compound risks. In this respect, it is of great significance to implement resilient governance for national parks. The present study aims to construct a community participation mechanism in terms of resilience governance, with the Park as a case study, hoping to find a way that promotes the development of both national parks and their surrounding communities
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