Newly Published : "Evaluating Effectiveness: A Framework for Assessing Management of Protected Areas"

Amman, Jordan, October 5, 2000 (IUCN) - We all want to do the best in our chosen field of endeavour. To really excel we need to be able to evaluate our efforts and to use this information to help us to improve. For athletes in the recent Olympic Games there were ready measures they could use to evaluate their performance; the time taken to run a hundred metres or the number of goals scored by the team. When we try to evaluate the effectiveness of protected area management, it isn't quite so easy.

That's why the IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) has published a book giving guidelines for protected area managers to do just that by providing a framework to use for assessing management effectiveness of protected areas and protected area systems. In a clear and straightforward text the book explains the principles behind management effectiveness and then explains the processes necessary to the assessment.

As we enter the 21st century, almost a tenth of the world's land surface is in some form of protected area - national parks, nature reserves, landscape protected areas and wilderness - and there is an extensive and growing network of marine protected areas. This is a remarkable achievement for the world's governments and conservation organisations.

It is therefore all the more remarkable to realise how little we know about the status of many of these protected areas. This is more than just of academic interest. What little we do know suggests that many protected areas are not in particularly good shape, suffering from a variety of impacts and in some cases in danger of losing the very values for which they were set aside in the first place.

We clearly need to put as much effort into achieving sound and effective management of protected areas as into setting up new areas. As a result, interest is growing in ways in which we can monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of protected areas and apply the findings to progressively improve on-going management. This is not as easy as it sounds. "Protection" encompasses many values and has numerous facets. Loss of quality in protected areas can occur in many different forms. Effectiveness needs to be measured from various points of view and at many different levels, from quick assessments used to guide priority setting at national or international levels to detailed monitoring studies undertaken to inform better management in the field. The guidelines produced by WCPA are designed to assist in designing assessment systems to meet all these needs.

This book is No. 6 of the Best Practice Protected Areas Guidelines series, supported by Cardiff University.