Conflict in Protected Areas: Who Says Co-Management Does Not Work?

Natural resource-related conflicts can be extremely destructive and undermine environmental protection. Since the 1990 s co-management schemes, whereby the management of resources is shared by public and/or private sector stakeholders, have been a main strategy for reducing these conflicts worldwide. Despite initial high hopes, in recent years co-management has been perceived as falling short of expectations. However, systematic assessments of its role in conflict prevention or mitigation are non-existent. Interviews with 584 residents from ten protected areas in Colombia revealed that co-management can be successful in reducing conflict at grassroots level, as long as some critical enabling conditions, such as effective participation in the co-management process, are fulfilled not only on paper but also by praxis. We hope these findings will re-incentivize global efforts to make co-management work in protected areas and other common pool resource contexts, such as fisheries, agriculture, forestry and water management

Location of the visited NPAs (for more details please see Table 2).

<p>Location of the visited NPAs (for more details please see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0144943#pone.0144943.t002" target="_blank">Table 2</a>).</p

Conflicts reported to be experienced by people as a function of the number of co-management conditions perceived to be fulfilled (GLM with binomial distribution and logit link function; N = 584; z = -5.68; <i>P</i> = 1.3e-8).

<p>A condition was considered fulfilled if at least one of its sub-conditions was met (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0144943#pone.0144943.t001" target="_blank">Table 1</a> for list of sub-conditions). This model explains 11% of the null deviance.</p

Distribution of the experience of conflict and the perception of the fulfillment of co-management conditions according to residents of the different study areas where n≥20 (N = 530).

<p>Distributions were significantly different (<i>P</i><<0.001) across study areas (Kruskall-Wallis chi-squared = 177.04 and 352.39 for conflict and co-management conditions, respectively). Letters indicate groups of study areas with similar distributions, based on multiple comparison post-hoc tests (threshold at <i>P</i> 0.01)[<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0144943#pone.0144943.ref035" target="_blank">35</a>].</p

Distribution of the reported experience of conflict and the perception of the fulfilment of trust and effective participation conditions according to residents of the different study areas.

<p>Distribution of the reported experience of conflict and the perception of the fulfilment of trust and effective participation conditions according to residents of the different study areas.</p