Stakeholders’ Perceptions Concerning Greek Protected Areas Governance

Dimitra Syrou,Iosif Botetzagias

doi:10.3390/su14063389

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in assessing the Greek protected areas’ (PAs) operation, and in particular, to what extent the stakeholders engaged in their management consider that the “good environmental governance” criteria are met. Through the use of Q-methodology, we find that, despite the very different circumstances of each PA, the stakeholders’ views cluster around four distinctive main perspectives (or factors). Furthermore, we find that stakeholders do not consider, overall, that the Greek PAs management strongly meets any of the “good environmental governance” criteria, with particularly poor assessments on crucial governance aspects such as a shared vision guiding the PA management, the rule of law, and the effectiveness/efficiency of the procedures, which suggests that the environmental governance of Greek PAs is suboptimal at least.

Highlights

In order to answer our research question, we first compiled a list of 51 statements which tap on the notion of “good governance” as this is described in the relevant literature
We presented these statements to a purposefully selected sample of Greek protected areas’ (PAs) Management Bodies’ board members, asking them to rank order these statements based on the extent each of them “describes/is representative of the governance of the protected area you serve as a member of the management body?”
We identified the main perspectives which stakeholders hold for the governance of the Greek environmental protected areas