More strictly protected areas are not necessarily more protective: evidence from Bolivia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Thailand

By Paul J. Ferraro, M. Hanauer, D. Miteva, Gustavo Canavire-Bacarreza, Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, Katharine R. E. Sims. 2013

190 citations recorded by the source corpus.

National parks and other protected areas are at the forefront of global efforts to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, not all protection is equal. Some areas are assigned strict legal protection that permits few extractive human uses. Other protected area designations permit a wider range of uses. Whether strictly protected areas are more effective in achieving environmental objectives is an empirical question: although strictly protected areas legally permit less anthropogenic disturbance, the social conflicts associated with assigning strict protection may lead politicians to assign strict protection to less-threatened areas and may lead citizens or enforcement agents to ignore the strict legal restrictions. We contrast the impacts of strictly and less strictly protected areas in four countries using IUCN designations to measure de jure strictness, data on deforestation to measure outcomes, and a quasi-experimental design to estimate impacts. On average, stricter protection reduced deforestation rates more than less strict protection, but the additional impact was not always large and sometimes arose because of where stricter protection was assigned rather than regulatory strictness per se. We also show that, in protected area studies contrasting y management regimes, there are y2 policy-relevant impacts, rather than only y, as earlier studies have implied.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f59dadea243d236738e66099ad478020e02b6f8

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Citations in the corpus

Paper park performance: Mexico's natural protected areas in the 1990s (2015, methodology): “We use International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifications to distinguish between the two groups: IUCN categories V and VI comprise the mixed-use group (e.g., Ferraro et al., 2013; Nelson and Chomitz, 2011).”
What Drives Deforestation and What Stops it? A Meta-Analysis of Spatially Explicit Econometric Studies (2014, unknown): “The apparent greater impacts of multiple-use managed areas than strict areas (Nelson and Chomitz 2012) may be reversed after controlling for the greater risk of these lands in the absence of intervention (Ferraro et al 2013).”
Effects of Protected Areas on Forest Cover Change and Local Communities (2014, methodology): “Although the evidence is quite mixed, at least some studies indicate that mixed-use protected areas (or multiple-use parks) can be more effective at reducing deforestation (Blackman 2014; Nelson and Chomitz 2011; Pfaff et al. 2013; Ferraro et al. 2013).”
Parks versus PES: Evaluating direct and incentive-based land conservation in Mexico (2017, unknown): “Yet as our results corroborate, avoided deforestation is not necessarily greater for strict protected areas versus those with intermediate levels of restrictions (Ferraro et al. 2013, Pfaff et al. 2014b, Miranda et al. 2014).”
Deforestation slowdown in the Brazilian Amazon: prices or policies? (2015, background): “See Andam et al. (2008); Pfaff et al., 2009, 2014; Sims (2010); Soares-Filho et al. (2010); Joppa and Pfaff (2011); Nelson and Chomitz (2011); Ferraro et al. (2013); Nolte et al. (2013).”