Unbundling Property Rights among Stakeholders of Bataan Natural Park: Implications to Protected Area Governance in the Philippines

Abstract

ABSTRACT Protected areas such as natural parks provide a range of ecosystem services vital to human well-being. The common-pool-resource nature of natural parks has made them susceptible to overuse and degradation, especially when property rights among multiple and varied stakeholders are not clearly defined. It is therefore imperative to analyze property rights of these stakeholders to facilitate an effective, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable natural parks’ management – an area less explored in current literature. Using Schlager and Ostrom’s framework on “bundles of rights” and based on stakeholder analysis and a perception survey conducted among 382 occupants of the Philippines’ Bataan Natural Park (BNP), we argue that a deeper understanding of the stakeholders’ property rights is an important initial step toward enhancing the governance of the country’s protected areas. Results revealed that cooperatives, associations, and the business sector have a wider range of property rights compared to the majority of the Park’s occupants based on the legal instruments awarded to them by the Philippine Government. Perceptions of non-tenured migrants, which constitute a majority of the BNP’s occupants, deviate from their actual legal rights. This disparity between perceived and actual rights contributes to problems like illegal resource extraction and land conflicts. We distilled key governance implications in the context of property rights which maybe relevant to other protected areas of similar situation.