Designing New Natural Resource Management Institutions: An Approach to Devolution of the Rights to Manage Protected Area Resources

Abstract

"Protecting areas as national parks is one tool to secure biodiversity. Establishment of such areas, as well as managing and supervising them, is often characterized by reluctance and protests from landowners, local people, and resource users. Thus, numerous measures are implemented in order to increase the legitimacy of protecting these areas' to provide other sources of income for those who are negatively affected by the conservation decision, and to apply the international 'new conservation paradigm'. The latter focuses on increasing the benefits to local people to alleviate poverty, on re-engineering the organization of the professionals working with protected areas and an increased emphasis on the interaction between humans and nature. In Norway, two such important measures have recently been implemented: one is to remove the ban on commercial tourism, another is the devolution of the right to manage these areas. The former will make it easier to establish tourism in protected areas, while the latter will lead to a decentralization of governance of protected areas. These developments are too recent to evaluate fully, but studying the empirical background for these changes can give valuable insights in relation to how institutional design is attempted in different social-ecological settings. This paper will focus on the process leading up to the devolution of PA governance, and will show which kinds of interests that have been prioritized when the new board has been designed. Studies over several years contribute to the data for this paper. These involve content analysis of public documents, interviews with interest groups as well as authorities, surveys, and observation. Altogether this has provided us with an understanding of the processes going on in relation to devolution of the right to manage protected areas. The authors are continuously following the work of Norway´s first national park board, and still serve as observers of meetings. Thus, the paper will not only analyze the background for the establishment of the national park board, but will also discuss the boards' initial work focusing on the degree to which interest groups still can fight for their views. We also discuss some of the challenges the new boards have when managing complex social-ecological systems, such as protected areas. These are closely related to more general challenges for protected areas, while they at the same time represent a major decentralization of the power to decide on central issues related to securing biodiversity and provide crucial ecosystem services. Studying complex systems is a task that requires the use of multiple methods, and we believe that our approach also contributed to a better understanding of the challenges involved in institutional design in a highly complex system. This will be reflected upon at the end of the paper."