The concept of assessing protected area management effectiveness has gained important official support from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Many of the protected area agencies and other users of the WCPA Framework may in the future be doing so directly as a result of their country's commitment to the CBD.
At the seventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2004, 188 countries agreed to a Programme of Work on Protected Areas, one of the most ambitious environmental strategies in history. The Programme aims, by 2010 (terrestrial) and 2012 (marine), to establish “comprehensive, effectively managed and ecologically-representative national systems of protected areas”. To do that, it identifies four programme elements, 16 goals and 92 activities for the Parties, many of which have specific timetables. The four elements can be divided into nine main themes (see box below).
Programme element 1: Direct actions for planning, selecting, establishing, strengthening, and managing, protected area systems and sites
Building protected area networks and the ecosystem approach
Site-based protected area planning and management
Addressing threats to protected areas
Programme element 2: Governance, participation, equity and benefit sharing
Improving the social benefits of protected areas
Programme element 3: Enabling activities
Creating an enabling policy environment
Capacity building
Ensuring financial stability
Programme element 4: Standards, assessment, and monitoring
Management standards and effective management
Using science
In the current context, the CBD Programme of Work is important because it puts equal emphasis on creating new reserves and on managing the reserve network and makes capacity building a central tenet of its approach. Management standards and effective management is a key theme in Programme element 4.
Many actions have specific deadlines. For the first time, a major intergovernmental commitment includes specific reference to management effectiveness of protected areas, which appears in several of the actions recommended to Parties as outlined in the box.
In theory, then, all signatory countries to the CBD should be carrying out at least some management effectiveness assessments by 2010 and using these in their reports to the CBD.
Goal 4.2 - To evaluate and improve the effectiveness of protected areas management
Target: By 2010, frameworks for monitoring, evaluating and reporting protected areas management effectiveness at sites, national and regional systems, and transboundary protected area levels adopted and implemented by Parties.
Suggested activities of the Parties
4.2.1 Develop and adopt, by 2006, appropriate methods, standards, criteria and indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of protected area management and governance, and set up a related database, taking into account the IUCN-WCPA Framework for evaluating management effectiveness, and other relevant methodologies, which should be adapted to local conditions.
4.2.2 Implement management effectiveness evaluations of at least 30 percent of each Party's protected areas by 2010 and of national protected area systems and, as appropriate, ecological networks.
4.2.3 Include information resulting from evaluation of protected areas management effectiveness in national reports under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
4.2.4 Implement key recommendations arising from site- and system-level management effectiveness evaluations, as an integral part of adaptive management strategies