Indicators for assessing good governance of protected areas: Insights from park managers in Western Australia

Abstract

Effective management of protected areas relies on good governance. An assessment was undertaken using the standards provided by the United Nations Development Programme's characteristics of good governance for sustainable development as a starting point. Being able to assess governance based on indicators is essential for ongoing effective management through improving practice. Although indicators and evaluation frameworks are available, they do not offer protected area managers a quick, comprehensive measure of governance. We used a three-round Delphi method with a cohort of 33 managers and researchers from government and non-government organizations, and universities. This participatory research process established a set of 20 indicators addressing public participation, consensus orientation, strategic vision, responsiveness, effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, transparency, equity, and rule of law. Accompanying output measures were provided by management plans, annual reports, audits, and stakeholder engagement. The findings emphasize the contributions of management plans and annual reports in establishing evaluation requirements and providing a place where results are publicly available. Further participatory research to refine these indicators and apply them in a diversity of contexts is advocated.

Governance and Management of Protected Natural Areas in the Era of Overtourism

“…Abrams et al (2003) and Borrini-Feyerabend et al (2013) provided more than 100 such indicators, associated with five of the good governance principles of Graham et al (2003) (Table 2.1). Shields et al (2016) have identified a significantly smaller number of broadly useful indicators (20) based on a three-round Delphi survey with the Australian PA managers and experts. Along with that, instead of the nine original UNDP governance principles (Table 2.1), the authors employed 10, by splitting the 'efficiency and effectiveness' principle into 'efficiency' and 'effectiveness' as separate requirements.…”

“…By using the DPSIR framework, 5 Eklund and Cabezza (2017) tried to explain how governance quality affects specific PA management outcomes. Based on a three-round Delphi survey involving 33 middle-to seniorlevel staff from Western Australian PA agencies, Shields et al (2016) identified 20 good governance indicators in the form of questions (aligned with ten governance principles). The authors connected them with the accompanying output measures, e.g.…”

“…Within this chapter, special attention is paid to the explanation of protected area governance and management assessment methodologies and their interrelation. Finally, the governance-management assessment method developed by Shields et al (2016) is applied to the case of Krka NP in Croatia to discuss its fundamental shortcomings with respect to governance-management and recommendations for their improvement.…”

Evaluating Good Governance in Preserved Forests: a Comparison Between Community-based and State-based Forest Management in South Sumatera

“…Lockwood provides one of the few published efforts to integrate evaluation of protected area governance with PAME evaluations placing good governance principles 'above' the evaluation components of context, planning, inputs, process, outputs, and outcomes (Shields et al, 2016).…”

Towards an indicator system to assess equitable management in protected areas

“…Most efforts to assess social equity in PAs have focused on identifying the distribution of costs and the sharing of benefits (for a review see Schreckenberg et al 2010 andde Lange et al 2016). Procedural issues and their links with matters of recognition have received less attention (see Lockwood 2010;Borrini-Feyerabend et al 2013;Wilkie et al 2015;Shields et al 2016). Furthermore, although multidimensional social equity principles in PAs have been conceptually defined (Schreckenberg et al 2016), still the variety of methodologies and tools employed to assess the different dimensions of social equity separately (see de Lange et al 2016 for a review), along with budget and time constraints, are key concerns for policy makers and specially those working on conservation practice.…”