Conservation and social outcomes of private protected areas.

George Holmes,Rachel Palfrey,Johan Oldekop

doi:10.1111/cobi.13668

Abstract

Government administered protected areas (PAs) have dominated conservation strategies, discourse, and research, yet private actors are increasingly managing land for conservation. Little is known about the social and environmental outcomes of these privately protected areas (PPAs). We searched the global literature in English on PPAs and their environmental and social outcomes and identified 412 articles suitable for inclusion. Research on PPAs was geographically skewed; more studies occurred in the United States. Environmental outcomes of PPAs were mostly positive (89%), but social outcomes of PPAs were reported less (12% of all studies), and these outcomes were more mixed (65% positive). Private protected areas increased the number or extent of ecosystems, ecoregions, or species covered by PAs (representativeness) and PA network connectivity and effectively reduced deforestation and restored degraded lands. Few PPA owners reported negative social outcomes, experienced improved social capital, increased property value, or a reduction in taxes. Local communities benefited from increased employment, training, and community-wide development (e.g., building of schools), but they reported reduced social capital and no significant difference to household income. The causal mechanisms through which PPAs influence social and environmental outcomes remain unclear, as does how political, economic, and social contexts shape these mechanisms. Future research should widen the geographical scope and diversify the types of PPAs studied and focus on determining the casual mechanisms through which PPA outcomes occur in different contexts. We propose an assessment framework that could be adopted to facilitate this process.

Highlights

Biodiversity is in crisis, with extinction rates 1,000 times higher than expected background rates (Diaz et al, 2019)
privately protected areas (PPAs) deserve greater attention because they may be increasing in number due to rising trends in neoliberal conservation approaches that facilitate a role for private actors (Büscher and Whande, 2007: Hardy et al, 2017), and because there is a pressing need for conservation on private land to help achieve global conservation goals (Kamal et al, 2015).The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) currently reports 13,103 privately governed protected areas (PAs) (UNEP-WCMC, IUCN & NGS, 2020)
Our results show an increasing trend in the number of published peer-reviewed articles in English focusing on PPAs, but the overall number of articles continues to be small

Summary

Introduction

Biodiversity is in crisis, with extinction rates 1,000 times higher than expected background rates (Diaz et al, 2019). PPAs deserve greater attention because they may be increasing in number due to rising trends in neoliberal conservation approaches that facilitate a role for private actors (Büscher and Whande, 2007: Hardy et al, 2017), and because there is a pressing need for conservation on private land to help achieve global conservation goals (Kamal et al., 2015).The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) currently reports 13,103 privately governed PAs (UNEP-WCMC, IUCN & NGS, 2020). This may be a substantial underestimate as only a small proportion of countries report PPAs to the WDPA and these may only report a subset of existing PPAs (Fitzsimons, 2001; Bingham et al 2017).

Results

Methods

Discussion

Literature Cited