Planning for Democracy in Protected Rural Areas: Application of a Voting Method in a Spanish-Portuguese Reserve

Abstract

The planning of protected rural areas is usually defined by institutional decision-makers without considering the preferences of the local communities that live on the land, which frequently leads to conflicts in land management. This paper proposes a voting method based on the Borda count to rank the management goals of a protected rural area. The method was applied in a Spanish-Portuguese reserve called Iberian Plateau with the aim of collecting the preferences of institutional decision-makers (government and scientists) and rural landowners (farmers and businesspersons). Regarding the conservation and development objectives, the results show differences in spatial planning when only the preferences of institutional decision-makers are taken into consideration, as opposed to when the preferences of landowners are included within the analysis.

Dealing with Water Conflicts: A Comprehensive Review of MCDM Approaches to Manage Freshwater Ecosystem Services

“…Indeed, in international river basins, water management institutions do not tend to manage conflicts if there is no treaty stating the rights and responsibilities of each nation, or any implicit agreement [153]. In terms of the operational framework, MCDM methods can be a very useful tool for identifying conflicts and efficiently managing them [154]. In addition to the scientific soundness of the models, participation plays a relevant role in a number of ways: on the one hand, expert recommendations are needed to improve their operability and support their legitimacy [134] and, on the other hand, incorporating participation in the early stages of the decision-making processes helps to minimise conflicts and facilitates their management in the development of public policies [155].…”

A Goal Programming Model to Guide Decision-Making Processes towards Conservation Consensuses

“…AHP is based on the analysis of pairwise comparisons between all the criteria organized in a hierarchical structure and uses the eigenvalue method and the geometric mean to aggregate all the assessments in one single aggregated solution [64]. Prior to aggregation, inconsistences in responses were corrected using a goal programming model based on [65] that has been successfully applied in several studies [2,7,27,28]. Once the inconsistences were corrected, an aggregated assessment was obtained using a geometric mean.…”

“…Decision-making related to protected areas planning and management is difficult to carry out due to inherent conflicts among stakeholders with divergent interests, making consensual solutions hard to achieve [1]. Restrictions affecting owners, managers, and local residents, as well as low access of these groups to decision-making, lack of communication among stakeholders and exclusion of particular groups of stakeholders, such as landowners, from decision-making processes, are factors that foster the perception that nature conservation policies affect negatively local communities, both economically and socially [2]. This perception creates feelings of frustration within some stakeholders' groups, promoting conflicts that sometimes result in anti-environmental behaviors or even environmental crimes, such as wildlife poisoning or illegal fire-setting [3].…”

Seasonality and Efficiency of the Hotel Industry in the Balearic Islands: Implications for Economic and Environmental Sustainability

“…This vision of sustainability was incorporated into the political guidelines issued in the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and in subsequent summits organized by the United Nations [29]. The environmental aspects of sustainability are easier to define, as they primarily concern the conservation of environmental resources [30]. From an economic point of view, The World Tourism Organization [31] identifies seven dimensions of sustainability, one of which is tourism seasonality.…”