Review
Fifteen years of delegated protected area management inWest and Central Africa: five recommendations to guide maturity
PAUL SCHOLTE
Abstract Delegated protected area management (transfer- ring management responsibilities from a public to a private partner) has been promoted to give impetus to ailing pro- tected areas in West and Central Africa. Since their incep- tion in 2005, the number of partnerships has increased to 20 protected areas covering c. 250,000 km2, an area similar to that of the UK. A review of the lessons learnt from these first 15 years shows that delegated management has im- proved day-to-day management of these protected areas. There remain, however, challenges with funding and with the capacity of national managerial staff, and also concerns regarding human rights. Based on an analysis of these chal- lenges, I develop five recommendations to guide more ma- ture delegated management: governments should (1) ensure an enabling legal–procedural environment; and (2) prepare delegated management contracts systematically; (3) private partners should render themselves dispensable through capacity building of national managerial staff and by initiat- ing sustainable financing mechanisms; (4) governments and private partners alike should respect human rights and build coalitions with communities; (5) governments, private part- ners and funders should strive to delegate non-coremanage- ment tasks, such as tourist guiding and reception, community development and research, to specialized locally-based indi- viduals and organizations. Although these recommendations have a specific West–Central African perspective, they have relevance for the increasing number of delegated manage- ment initiatives elsewhere in Africa and beyond.
Keywords Capacity development, Central Africa, collab- orative management, co-management, delegated manage- ment, public–private partnerships, sustainable funding, West Africa
Introduction
in their national parks (Craigie et al., 2010;Scholte, 2021b). Among the drivers of these declines are low levels of fund- ing, generally,10% of estimated needs (Lindsey et al., 2018), highly centralized management (Scholte et al., 2018), and instability as a result of insecurity and poor governance (Bauer et al., 2021). Delegated management has been proposed as an instru-
W
ment to secure additional funding, improve day-to-day protected area management and provide upscaled anti- poaching measures in unstable areas (Hatchwell, 2014; Baghai et al., 2018; Scholte et al., 2018). Delegated manage- ment involves the transfer of management responsibilities from a public partner (generally a government body) to another partner (generally an international NGO; Baghai et al., 2018; Scholte et al., 2021a). These partnerships, some- times also called public–private partnerships, are character- ized by a contractual base, a public partner that delegates all or some of its prerogatives, and a private partner having autonomy over all finances (Scholte et al., 2021a). African Parks, a South-Africa based NGO, pioneered
PAUL SCHOLTE (Corresponding author,
orcid.org/0000-0003-3813-7363,
pault.scholte@
gmail.com) Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
Received 29 November 2020. Revision requested 5 February 2021. Accepted 24 May 2021. First published online 25 April 2022.
delegated management in Africa, and in 2003 started man- aging degraded protected areas in southern Africa, aiming to rehabilitate them and render them economically viable. In 2004, African Parks took an interest in Central Africa when joining a consortium of conservation organizations assisting Garamba National Park, aWorld Heritage Site in danger in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In 2005 the delegated management contract of Garamba National Park was negotiated between African Parks and the DRC government, with the ‘encouragement of the EU’, subsequently the main donor to the Park (Kalpers & Arranz, 2015). In the same year the DRC government also subcontracted the management of Virunga National Park, another World Heritage Site in danger. Delegated manage- ment in Central Africa took off with the signature of part- nerships in Chad, Republic of the Congo and Rwanda in 2010 (Fig. 1). Benin and Niger were the first West African countries with delegated management, with contracts signed in 2017–2020. This brought the total number of pro- tected areas with delegated management to 20 in seven
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2022, 56(6), 908–916 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000752
est and Central Africa have been confronted with a long-term decline of large mammal populations
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