Evaluation of the Impact of Policymakers' Decisions in the Management Capacity of Protected Areas: Efficiency Evidence from Five Countries.

Protected areas play an important role in biodiversity conservation and tourism. Significant efforts have been made to increase the amount of protected lands. A problem of increasing the amount of public protected areas is that governments and other institutions face difficulties in providing the necessary resources for effective management. Accordingly, managers must be as efficient as possible but the lack of comparative methods makes the evaluation of efficiency difficult. Using Data Envelopment Analysis, a non-stochastic and non-parametric approach, information from 29 protected areas in 5 countries was analyzed to compare management efficiency amongst them. The first result found is the level of management efficiency that each park has in comparison with the others parks. The other important result is a prediction of the changes in the outputs if there is a hypothetical budget change. These results allow the generation of information for decision making.

Planning for long, wide conservation corridors on private lands in the Oak Ridges Moraine, Ontario, Canada.

We explored the role of conservation biology in the planning of a natural-heritage system that includes long, wide conservation corridors situated primarily on private lands, and established to connect natural core areas in the Oak Ridges Moraine of Ontario, Canada. We based our review on government documents, semi-structured interviews with participants involved in this land-use planning process, and our involvement with the issue from 1990 through 2002. Conservation biology had a major influence on the outcome of the land-use planning process for this moraine. The landform was identified as an area of value by the environmental movement within the context of a number of ongoing government studies that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Conservation biologists and planners in government, the environmental movement, and the private sector carried out work related to conservation biology, including inventories and the development and application of criteria for the delineation of core areas and conservation corridors. Once the political timing was favorable (2001-2002), decision makers linked the science of conservation biology to planning policies and law in Ontario. The Oak Ridges Moraine land-use planning process was precedent setting in Canada, and possibly internationally. To our knowledge this is the first time long, wide conservation corridors on private lands were regulated through land-use-planning legislation and led to restrictions on urban development and aggregate resource extraction.

Emerging governance approaches for tourism in the protected areas of china.

This paper examines the recent evolution in the governance of protected area tourism in China. China now sees cooperation in the form of public-private partnerships occurring between authorized private tourism enterprises in various organizational forms and the public managers from specific portfolio departments of governments at different levels. Three types of governance models are visible: the Leasing Model, the Non-listed Share-holding Model, and the Public-listed Share-holding Model. Theories of corporate governance were applied to these models to analyze the internal and external mechanisms of supervision and incentives for both the government agencies and the authorized tourism enterprises for nature-based tourism operations. The Principal-Agent problem and the supervision mechanism are the focus of the analysis. The emerging governance approaches for tourism in protected areas of China are all theoretically viable, as explained by the theory of property rights and corporate governance, and practically viable as elaborated in the cases of the three types of governance models summarized in this paper.