Top‐down conservation targets and bottom‐up management action: creating complementary feedbacks for freshwater conservation

Abstract

Abstract Conservation targets are useful policy tools, indicating a degree of political intent and allowing purposeful conservation planning. However, target setting and implementation often occur at different scales. A largely unmet challenge is to establish mutual feedbacks between national‐scale target setting and local‐scale ecological realities and management actions. Freshwater conservation in South Africa has been advanced through the participatory setting of a freshwater conservation target (20% of each freshwater ecosystem type). This paper presents the response of a conservation agency, South African National Parks, to achieving the national target. In a first step, achievement of the national target was contextualized within the agency's mandate to conserve biodiversity through 19 National Parks. In the second step, information was scaled down further to reflect the relative contribution of an individual park (Tankwa‐Karoo National Park) to freshwater conservation in South Africa. At agency level, national‐scale data translated into several recommendations to influence the future expansion and design of protected areas, helped to articulate key messages regarding the organization's contribution to meeting national targets, and triggered the development of strategic objectives to promote in‐house capacity for effective freshwater conservation. Park‐level application of national‐scale data informed recommendations for management, research and monitoring. At the same time, local‐scale survey data highlighted deficiencies in the national data layers. Establishing feedbacks between top‐down setting of conservation targets and bottom‐up implementing of management actions is desirable and possible, but also intricate. To promote the establishment of such feedbacks, four generic insights are drawn from this case study: top‐down targets and bioregional‐scale biodiversity data have enabling utility; effective feedbacks can only be realized through systemic conservation governance; social factors are at least as important as technical advances; national‐scale maps are not necessarily accurate but can still be used to facilitate co‐learning and dynamic refinement. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.