Given limited budgets to enforce access restrictions, protected area (PA) managers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in developing countries employ a range of policy instruments to conserve the area's natural resources. Natural characteristics of the PA combine with the managers' enforcement activities and other policy instruments to create a set of incentives to which local people respond in making decisions about extracting resources from the PA. The different management approaches employed in the Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve (XNR; China) and the Khao Yai National Park (KYNP; Thailand) and the reaction to the incentives which they create are compared. KYNP managers use policing and punishment mechanisms, in conjunction with limited NGO-supported income-generation projects, to deter resource use. In contrast, XNR managers rely on extensive cooperation with local people and trade-offs between current resource degradation and increased rural incomes.As predicted by the economic enforcement literature, rural people respond to the threat of punishment, and its reduction of the expected benefit of an illegal activity, by reducing that activity, but may undertake socially-costly avoidance activities to avoid punishment. This literature also correctly predicts that XNR managers will concentrate less on pure enforcement than KYNP managers because, as a result of a difference in government mandates, the XNR managers consider the value of the extracted products and the non-PA productivity in their decisions while the KYNP managers do not. In both PAs, rural people's actions affect the quality of resource conservation. In KYNP, natural characteristics and the policing activities deter resource extraction and encroachment in the central core of the Park. Even NGO projects, however, have not controlled extraction, and even agricultural encroachment, in the outer third of the Park, which has caused over-extraction of some resources and has left a ring of highly-degraded land. In contrast, XNR's cooperative management approach has generated more control over the amount and the spatial configuration of resource degradation. XNR's control, however, comes at the cost of reduced area and level of current conservation.
Entiat, Twisp, and the Upper Okanogan Valley. We explore how the Plan affected the flow of socioeconomic benefits associated with the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, such as the production of forest commodities and forest-based recreation, agency jobs, procurement contract work for ecosystem management activities, grants for community economic assistance, payments to county governments, and opportunities for collaborative forest management. The greatest socioeconomic change stemming from the national forest during the study period was the sharp decline in timber harvest activities, a change that had been underway prior to the Plan. This decline not only affected timber industry jobs in local communities, but also resulted in declining agency budgets and staff reductions. Communities' responses differed. Communities with greater economic diversity were able to absorb the changes in forest management, whereas communities more heavily dependent on timber experienced an additional destabilizing effect.
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