Transboundary Protected Areas and Adaptive Management

Arun Agrawal¹

INTRODUCTION

In examining the transboundary implications of adaptive management, this paper focuses on protected areas (PA)². Protected arm are one of the most important elements in the conservation strategies of nation states and international nature conservation agencies (Alpert 1993; Butynski and Kalina 1993; IUCN 1998; Lucas 1992; McNeely 1995; McNeely and Miller 1984; Van Osten 1972; West and Brechin 1991). Currently covering nearly 6% of the planet's land surface, more than 8,500 protected areas constitute one of the most visible symbols of concern for nature (WRI 1994). If marine areas are included, the number increases to over 10,000, and the area under protection in different forms to nearly 9% of the planet's surface (Brandon Redford and Sanderson 1998).

The number of protected areas and their total acreage has increased enormously over the last 100 years. Since the 1980s, it may also be argued that the principles of their management have undergone a tremendous transformation. The chief direction along which this transformation has occurred can be characterised as a movement from exclusion to participation. In addition, the rate at which new territory is being included in protected areas has diminished since the mid-1980s. The establishment of any new protected area has therefore become a major undertaking. This is especially so in the tropics where much of the world's biodiversity and population resides.

Adaptive management for transboundary protected areas offers hope for a more careful assessment of ecological conditions within the protected areas. By paying greater attention to the interactions of animal/plant species across national boundaries, and the rhythms of the different interactive processes, adaptive management may bring to fruition some of the more recent trends in protected area management.

Conventional management of PAs often relies on hopes of accurate predictions and assumes short-term system equilibria. Top-down policies of control and exclusion are based on assumed models of predictable ecosystem functioning (Gunderson 1999). In the case of PAs, these aspects of conventional management translate into predictive models of linear growth of flora and fauna that inform strategies oriented to limit use and harvesting levels.

In contrast, adaptive management relies on learning from long-term experience, treating policy interventions as quasi-experiments, and collecting and analyzing significant amounts of information about ecosystem responses (Holling 1973; 1978). Adaptive management strategies emphasise the importance of learning and feedback, and accept that it may not be possible to build predictive models of ecosystem function and behavior. In the case of PAs, these features of adaptive management imply greater attention to interactions among key species, involvement of local populations in the collection of information about PA resources, and experimenting with different levels of use to infer how best to enhance benefits from protection (Walters 1986).

In some ways, adaptive management has the potential to complement the recent trend in protected area management where it has become common to involve local residents and community members in protection. Involvement of local populations can be crucial in generating the long-term information necessary for adaptive management techniques to work. This paper, in considering the transboundary implications of adaptive management, adopts a normative tone for the most part. Relying on secondary sources, the paper uses the description of a Polish/Belarusian reserve in Eastern Europe as a way to examine some of the arguments about adaptive management in tire context of transboundary parks.

COMMUNITY-BASED CONSERVATION

Early strategies for the creation of protected areas visualised them as islands of nature, surrounded by a rising tide of development. For a number of reasons it has become difficult to adhere to the exclusionary policies prior to and including the 1970s. Among the reasons is the growing recognition that humans have often shaped even what is seen as virginal nature. The louder rhetoric surrounding such allied concepts as community, civil society, participation, democracy, grassroots, and local interests has also made it difficult for state actors to high-handedly dismiss the claims of excluded groups. But perhaps the most important reasons are practical. Protected area managers have neither the capacity nor the resources to continue with preservationist policies that demand strict separation of humans and nature. The politics of development, of democratisation, and of community and civil society make such options impossible. Factors related to the growing influence of market-related solutions to natural resource conservation, and the fiscal crises of most nation states in developing countries also make this separation difficult.

The solutions for protected area management that have emerged in the past decade have been based on ideas embodied in buffer-zone management or integrated conservation and development projects. These strategies treat local resident populations as potential partners in protection, and combine the goals of conservation and development. Drawing in part on insights from theories of property rights, collective action, antisocial mobilisation, and in part on a populist turn in the rhetoric of resource use, local residents are visualised not just as users of resources, but also as effective managers. indeed, in many regions of the world, local populations had lived in territories that are home to environmentally key ecosystems, processes, and species.

Three key assumptions about the relationship of protected area management with local participation, devolution of property rights, and high levels of poverty undergird the new turn in protected area management, they are that:

1. Greater involvement of local communities will promote better conservation.
2. Greater devolution of property rights will lead to better conservation; and
3. Improving the incomes of local residents will lead to better conservation because the poor are forced, despite themselves, to overuse resources.

Each of these three assumptions, a wealth of new research has begun to show, is either difficult to use as the basis for protected area management, or is questionable.

Thus, for example, the form and nature of the community, and how it is to be involved in community-based conservation is still disputed. Several popular conceptualisations of the idea of community, especially those that see communities as small, bounded, fixed, harmonious, collections of agents with similar goals and norms, are inappropriate as the basis for management (Agrawal and Gibson 1999). Equally vexed is the nature of participation. Even if participation is interpreted narrowly in terms of the property rights over resources that local residents come to exercise, it has occurred only to a limited extent (Agrawal and Yadama 1997). There has been a significant advocacy of the devolution of property rights to communities, but in practice such devolution has been difficult or minimal. The incommensurable spatial scales of communities and protected areas, and the political costs of transferring authority to existing state actors have been only two of the reasons preventing change in resource ownership and management status (Naughton-Treves and Sanderson 1997). Finally, the involvement of local populations in income-enhancing programmes is based on the assumption that the poor are more likely to degrade resources. Once their incomes rise, they would become less dependent on resources within protected areas. In practice, this assumption may prove inappropriate as the rich can exercise greater control and therefore use local resources in parks even more intensively than the poor (Agrawal 1999).

However, the role of communities in protected area management remains critical because of the potential gains from such involvement of the different actors interested in protection, many members of communities are likely to have among the longest time horizons in relation to the resources on which they depend. Devolution of authority to accountable organisations of communities can create actors who are large enough to negotiate with state or other external actors. Finally, careful design of institutions can address stratification within communities so that allocation of benefits from managed resources is not skewed (Agrawal and Ostrom 1999).

PROBLEMS OF TRANSBOUNDARY PROTECTED AREAS MANAGEMENT

If the number of issues that provoke obstacles to careful management of national parks within the nation state is large, it multiplies in complexity where transnational protected areas are concerned. That is to say, if there is only an inadequate understanding of the issues and management questions at the level of the community or the region, political negotiations and international relations are even less theorised in relation to transboundary protected area management. In the environmental arena, international politics surrounding the allocation of externalities becomes critical because of the absence, vagueness, or unenforceability of transfrontier laws. In the region which this paper focuses on the primary reason is the tension between the sovereignty of nation states enshrined and consolidated since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and the interests that several nation states can have in the same territory, its resources, their use, or the externalities that result from use. Additionally, the emergence of competing concepts such as the common heritage of mankind, human rights, and the growing interdependence of the global economy create difficulties in unambiguous practical application of the idea of sovereignty.

The planet is divided into about 200 nation states (Westing 1998). The sovereignty of each of these states has three complimentary interpretations. Internal or territorial sovereignty implies that a nation state has exclusive domestic jurisdiction over all resources and people within its boundaries. External sovereignty means that in the international arena, no other state can subject a state to its will. External sovereignty is limited by international laws that are well explicated in some spheres, and only emerging in others. Sovereign equality says that all states are juridically equal (Schrijver 1997:57). These implications of national sovereignty, in the arena of environmental goods, are inscribed in the concept of 'permanent sovereignty over natural resources,' itself an outcome of the interest that most developing countries had in control over their territories in the wake of decolonisation and independence from European imperial nations.

Although the concept of permanent sovereignty of states over their natural resources creates rights that each state exercises to manage its resources, over the last three decades the concept has also come to mean reciprocal obligations or duties since all states are supposed to enjoy this right (ILA 1986; UNGA 1962). This principle is especially important because many resources such as wildlife, fisheries, oil and gas, water, and atmospheric air are hard to partition on the basis of national territorial boundaries. A number of bilateral and regional treaties and agreements on natural resources have been negotiated using criteria of prior use, historic rights, proportionality, and relative needs.

As it has become clearer that many natural resources cannot be protected without inter-state cooperation, at least three principles for the use of transboundary resources seem to have emerged to form the basis of international treaties. The first involves sharing of information and suggests that states will consult relevant parties on the use of transboundary resources. The second implies equitable sharing of transboundary resources. Finally, the third principle relies on not doing harm to another state as a result of activities within the boundaries of one (Westing 1998). The concept of common heritage for certain resources, especially space and deep sea mineral resources, implies the above three principles of sharing of information with relevant parties, but also suggests the reservation of these resources for the future, and some sharing of benefits.

In the context of transfrontier protected areas where wildlife movements and ecosystem protection are at issue, the relevant issues of joint management, mutual assistance, and mutual access to administrative and judicial proceedings require closer collaboration and negotiations. Although there are important benefits to be gained from closer collaboration, the issues are far more political, and hence, cooperation is more difficult. In many cases, changes in the status quo will threaten the interests of important stakeholders, and therefore, it is even more difficult to promote effective management where transboundary protected areas are concerned.

At a minimum, there is an increase in the number of implicit and explicit objectives of management. Because of the presence of a larger number of actors, there is greater difficulty in generating the information needed for making decisions. As a result of the combination of these two factors, dimensions along which tensions can exist among those involved are enhanced. These concerns become critical in relation to adaptive management of transboundary protected areas because of the emphasis in adaptive management to pay attention to the dynamics of systemic change, and the relationship of management to system behaviour.

NEED FOR TRANSBOUNDARY ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT

However, there are important justifications that favour transboundary protected area management. Perhaps the most important justification is based on ecological theories and arguments about distribution and representation of ecosystems in the protected area network. Environmental security, several scholars have argued, depends among other things on checking the continuing erosion of biodiversity and protection of ecosystems, landscapes, and keystone species and processes through protected areas. if one surveys the distribution of protected areas around the world, it will be found that they are distributed in a manner that ill represents some of the most important biomes and countries. The chief rationale for transfrontier reserves, then, is that many areas that should ideally be a part of the conservation network are situated along the political boundaries of the nation states. Typically, the political boundaries of nation states are distant from the major centres of development and in consequence these arm often bear the smallest imprint of human activities. Westing (1993a) estimates that nearly a third of the worlds high-priority natural habitats with significant levels of biodiversity covers some part of the 220,000km of international boundaries between nations states. The overlap of bioregions and their overIap with international boundaries creates the need for transboundary protected areas.

According to Westing (1998:93), protected areas can also play an important political role in inter-state relations. In some cases, they can safeguard and improve existing friendly relations between neighbouring states. But even where relations between states are not friendly, it is possible to use protected areas across borders as a mechanism to make existing territorial disputes less intense, or even irrelevant (McManus 1994; Westing 1993b), or to ease the reunification of divided states.

Even apart from the management of resources, transfrontier collaboration occurs among sovereign nation states where the interests of these states can be resolved without recourse to arms. Such collaboration has led to shared maritime zones among nation states along 33% of the possible 420 maritime boundaries (Blake 1993). Most of these are bilateral agreements and several have been in existence for more than 20 years. Apart from maritime zones, interstate collaboration that requires substantially more give and take than exchange of information or consultation is also necessary where neutral zones, buffer zones, rights of transit, regional economic cooperation, watershed cooperation, and sharing of land resources, such as minerals, are concerned. These last two perhaps require the greatest coordination and cooperation administratively, while rights of transit and economic cooperation entail substantial interactions on economic matters.

Given the importance of collaboration on protected areas, it is not surprising that despite all the difficulties in their creation, there are nearly 70 instances of different degrees of collaboration over the management of protected areas and nature reserves as well. The first international peace reserve was established when the Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada, established in 1911, and the Glacier National Park in the U.S.A. were joined together symbolically in 1932. Since then, several such protected areas with a high level of collaboration between the neighbouring countries have been established in Europe and Africa, which together have nearly 45 paired reserves, and South America and Asia, with 20 reserves between them. Given that many protected areas are on national boundaries, the figure of 70 paired transboundary protected areas is small, especially in comparison to the figure of 8,500 recognised protected natural areas of one kind or another.

The existence of adjacent protected areas across international boundaries is accompanied by different levels of co-operation among the governments of the states within whose boundaries the protected areas lie. It is possible that adjacent reserves will exist to protect ecosystems and species on different sides of international borders without any coordination among the states or the protected area bureaucracies. in some cases, where there are border tensions between the neighbouring states, the boundaries may be militarised, preventing even local contacts across the border. A second situation is where there is little coordination at the level of the nation state, but local park bureaucracies and resident populations have some interactions across the border. A third level of cooperation will be achieved when the countries establish their reserves so that they conform to international plans and share information, but continue to manage the areas independently. These three levels of cooperation can be seen as varying degrees of independent management with a potential to lead toward joint management.

It is primarily beyond this level of cooperation that adaptive management techniques become feasible.

Table 1: Conventional versus Adaptive Management Objective of Policy Analysis. Source: Adapted from Walters (1986).

Given the objectives of adaptive management, trying to follow related strategies will certainly necessitate greater sharing of information in the context of protected areas, so as to create the type of knowledge base on which management options can be devised. But adaptive management also requires cooperation that extends beyond information exchange. Because the rationale for adjacent transboundary protected areas is the joint protection of ecosystems that are arbitrarily divided by political lines, it follows that independent management of neighbouring protected areas is unlikely to allow much gain from adaptive management. At least two additional levels of cooperation that will facilitate adaptive management can be envisaged. in the first, the countries continue to own their territories, but in addition to exchanging information, they also carry out joint implementation of protection measures including approval of travel across the border for surveys, anti-poaching measures, fire management, creation of buffer zones, and administration of buffer zone programmes. In such situations, local populations can be involved closely in the management of the protected areas. Allocation of funds for creating alternative sources of incomes for local populations can take place jointly as well. The greatest level of cooperation would take place when the land that would come under the protected areas is made part of an international reserve managed under a single agreed upon management authority that includes staff from each country that has contributed land to the reserve (see also MacKinon 1993:83). These levels can be called cooperation for adaptive management.

Although one can visualise the greatest benefits flowing from transboundary protected area adaptive management from higher levels of cooperation, it is precisely this form of cooperation that is economically and politically the most difficult. Even in terms of economics, there are significant limits on the amount of finances available to undertake transboundary management. But in considering the feasibility of adaptive management for transboundary protected areas, three sets of questions need attention: Environmental, political, and economic. The first question is whether a transboundary protected area is feasible on environmental grounds? That is to say, is it necessary to have a reserve on more than one side of a border? Secondly, what are the political factors that facilitate or hinder the formation of a transfrontier protected area? Finally, one must consider whether adaptive management techniques provide greater insights or benefits related to park management in comparison to traditional strategies of protection. Adaptive management techniques can improve the management of even those protected areas that aim only to provide suitable habitats for ecosystem and species protection. After all, a protected area does not imply the lack of any human intervention at all. But adaptive management techniques are more likely to be considered and adopted when the protected areas are used for some additional benefits or where there is some significant level of human use of the protected area. Such uses can be tourism or limited harvesting of fodder or firewood from the protected area buffer zones for local residents.

Some of the points made above can be clarified with the help of the following examples showing actual or proposed transboundary protected arm, and the feasibility of adaptive management in such locations.

THE BIALOWIEZA NATIONAL PARK AND BIOSPHERE RESERVE IN POLAND AND BELARUS

The Bialowieza reserves comprise nearly 1,500km² (150,000ha) on the two sides of the Polish (625km²/ 62,500ha) and Belarusian (875km²/87,500ha) frontier. Its history of protection, like many parks around the world, started as a royal hunting reserve. Since 1977, the reserve on the Polish side has been declared a Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site. The Belarusian side was declared a site of the Man and Biosphere Programme (MAB) in 1993 with three protection zones. With a level of biodiversity that is still not fully investigated and is among the highest in Europe, this reserve is one of the earliest examples of transboundary protected areas in Europe. Different parts of the reserve on both sides of the border are under different management categories, from strict protection to managed forestry.

Most of the tree stands in the strictly protected part of the park on the Polish side are composed of deciduous species, while on the Belarusian side, the natural dominant tree stands are those of mixed conifers and oak. The Polish part has witnessed a much higher intensity of exploitation and plantation in comparison to the Belarusian forests. The average level of timber harvest is more than four times in the Polish area. In terms of the wildlife species, the Polish part has a high density of ungulates such as red deer, moose, roe deer, and wild boar, and their hunting is permitted. The numbers of European bison are kept in check through culling, but recently there have been some claims about their numbers being too high and that this is leading to damage to tree stands (Okarma et al. 1996).

Although a great deal of research has been carried out on the reserve, only a very limited amount of work, which has been carried out in the past few years with funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), has attempted to examine the transfrontier interactions between wildlife species (both ungulates and carnivores), and different varieties of plants. Parks on each side of the frontier have their own research establishment and bureaucracies, and until 1993 there was little cooperation across the frontier. Earlier research across the frontier is also hard to compare owing to the different methods that have been used. A two metre high fence still continues to divide the parks along the national borders, which acts as an artificial barrier for animal movements. Since 1993, however, a cooperative investigation has been launched to investigate the migration and range of wolves and lynxes. A protocol also permits park employees to visit either part of the park without border passes (GEF 1992a, 1992b).

We see that the general arguments about transnational protected areas are represented in this case study in a number of ways. The sovereignty of the two nation states prevented cooperation before 1993. Even the movement of animals across a habitat that constituted a single ecosystem was restricted owing to national boundaries. In terms of cooperation, whether the question was one of data collection, or of joint management, the park services of the two countries operated more or less independently. Their different management strategies are reflected in varying densities of different plant species and wild animals, and types of interactions among the different animal and plant species.

However, the existence of a transboundary reserve is certainly justifiable on environmental grounds. The amount of land set aside for core level of protection is limited on either side of the frontier. By allowing animals to range over the extent of the strictly protected areas in the reserve, it would be possible to allow a larger undisturbed habitat for carnivorous animals such as the wolf and the lynx. Over the past few years, through aid from the GEF, it has also become possible to undertake some cooperation in the arena of data collection and the movement of park officials across the national boundary that divides the reserve. However, for adaptive management techniques to be adopted in the reserve, more data and analyses are necessary. The standard arguments for better management of the reserve call for further exclusion of local residents from the protected area, and planting of new stands of trees (Breymeyer and Noble 1998). But for adaptive management, it may be more useful to gather information from local residents around the park, and to gain a better understanding of carnivore-ungulate-plant interactions, rather than advocate either new plantations, or to call for limiting the number of wild animals. The costs of such data collection can be drastically reduced through the involvement of local populations. Further, because local populations have a long-term interest in the sustainable management of resources in the protected areas, their meaningful involvement would also help local officials gain a longer-term view of park management. Clearly, one of the primary factors that affects the feasibility of using adaptive management techniques is the extent of articulation of the different levels of administration that are involved in the management of the reserve: From the top management to the local consumers.

CONCLUSIONS

The major argument of this paper relates to the need for greater attention to be drawn to how various levels of management in a given system articulate with the adaptive of adaptive management. While nation states and regional actors can make decisions concerning the spatial scale along which transboundary protected area management can be effective, their temporal horizons are far more limited than the typical time span over which returns from management can be expected. On the other hand, local residents are far more likely to have the kind of long-term horizons that are necessary for adaptive management. it is imperative then, to design institutional arrangements that have space for local residents and their representatives to contribute to management objectives, implementation, and enforcement.

A second inference of this paper is that promotion of adaptive management depends upon and furthers the likelihood of greater collaboration among the nation states that own the parks in their territories. Much of the existing work on transboundary nature conservation remarks on how such initiatives can further international cooperation. This paper suggests that adopting the principles of adaptive management is likely to impress upon the collaborating parties that independent management of adjacent protected areas is insufficient to gain the greatest possible benefits from protection. It is only by building management models of processual interactions in the ecosystems that comprise transboundary protected areas, by taking into account the information gathered by the different sides across the borders, jointly implementing the implications derived from these models, and involving local communities in these sets of activities, that we can begin to realise the full potential of adaptive management for transboundary protection of resources.

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